Hello Girls operated phones in Maine with great patience

One of the annual social events of the long winters a century ago was the Hello Girls’ dance. In order to get to know their colleagues, the telephone operators from the Bangor exchange of the New England Telephone and Telegraph Company put on a party for their fellow switchboard operators from Orono, Ellsworth, Bucksport and several other nearby communities. Only “eligibles” were allowed to attend the occasion Feb. 2, 1906, at Society Hall on Exchange Street. They included close friends of the operators, “preferably male,” and those who had “some other drag with the management.”

The title Hello Girls sounds frivolous and sexist today. But a century ago, their position in the community was regarded with respect. The telephone was still an object of wonder. Most people didn’t have them.

Subscribers at this early date were mainly wealthy individuals or businesses. To make even a local call, one had to go through an operator. Operators had to stay on their toes and be willing to put up with all sorts of rude comments from people who were intimidated or irritated by this new invention.

The qualifications to become one of the Hello Girls were relatively high for the times. “The telephone girl may not be educated, but she must be nice, as they say in the South, and must be possessed of at least a medium grade of intelligence,” according to a story in the Bangor Daily Commercial on June 14, 1892. “She must be able to write a letter, make a clear statement in good English, hold her tongue, keep her temper under every provocation and give her undivided attention to the business of the office. Any defect in her speech or hearing would necessarily disqualify her for the work.”

There were very few Hello Boys. Men were considered inattentive and quick to anger. This was back in the days when callers, mainly cranky males, shouted into their phones things such as “Hello, Central! Are you asleep?” or “Gimme 751 and get a move on.” If an operator talked back, she was fired. A red-blooded male, of course, would be expected to lose his temper in the face of such abuse.

But there also could be time for fun in some of the smaller exchanges, as this anecdote from the Bangor Whig & Courier indicated on July 13, 1881: “An operator in an office some 12 miles from here, informs us that frequently, in the evening when the wires are not being used, he listens to singing and music on the piano produced by friends in this city. A few evenings ago the gentleman in the office at Upper Stillwater was playing an accordion, and when he ceased and put the audiophone to his ear he was surprised to hear, ‘Thank you, give us some more,’ from Bradley.”

The origins of the telephone in Bangor are a bit murky. There are several stories. One says the first phones were installed by a coal company, Bacon & Huckins, between its office on the Kenduskeag bridge and its coal wharf, near the Maine Central Railroad depot on Front Street about a half-mile away.

A story about this event in the Bangor Whig & Courier on Aug. 11, 1877, fails to say it was the first telephone in Bangor, but newspapers identified it as such years afterward. One of these later newspaper pieces describes how dozens of curiosity seekers created an uproar at the coal company by coming in to look at the new contraption and try it out. Bacon built a closet around the device with a lock on the door to keep “meddlers” from experimenting.

People who wanted to try out the phone could make appointments through the mayor’s office. Several hundred visitors from St. John, New Brunswick, once included the telephone on their itinerary.

A letter to the editor of the Bangor Semi-Weekly on Jan. 1, 1900, offered a different story as to the origins of the first phone in the Queen City. Charles H. Stickney of Pueblo, Colo., said his former company, T.G. Stickney & Son, had established the first telephone system, also in 1877, connecting its offices in Bangor and Brewer. The company rented the devices for $5 apiece from the Bell Telephone Co. in Boston.

Years before that the company had installed a telegraph line, but Stickney had to ride from one office to the other across the river in a horse and carriage checking the accuracy of the messages because of the difficulties of mastering telegraphy.

A third story, repeated in the Bangor Daily News on Feb. 22, 1904, was that a “miniature telephone – the first ever in the State of Maine” was brought to Bangor by Isaiah Stetson, a student at Yale, and strung between the homes of Mrs. George Stetson and Dr. Augustus Hamlin. Among the visitors who observed the device during the summer of 1878, recounted Hamlin to a reporter, were a group of Russian naval captains staying in Southwest Harbor. Some of their battleships had been destroyed in fighting in the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, and hence the story.

The Bangor Telephone Co. was opened in 1880 over the Bangor Savings Bank by Charles S. Pearl as a sideline to his insurance business. Four years later there were 250 subscribers.

By August 1905 there were about 2,400. People paid $18 a year within a 6-mile radius of Bangor. The latest exchange was the little town of Bradford with 25 subscribers.

“Why if the present condition of affairs keeps on, all eastern Maine will some day be connected by telephone,” the local company manager predicted.

Dick Shaw contributed information for this column. Wayne E. Reilly can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.