THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, June 1, 1994 TAG: 9405280181
SECTION: ISLE OF WIGHT CITIZEN PAGE: 02 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: Linda McNatt
DATELINE: 940601 LENGTH: Medium
That was only about 20 years after the end of the Civil War, just 10 years after Alexander Graham Bell, in 1876, applied for the patent on the miraculous invention that eventually was to open the doors to worldwide communication.
{REST} Back then, in Smithfield, the telephone was only meant to get peanut prices from Norfolk to Smithfield, said Howard Gwaltney, the sole surviving member of the Home Telephone Company's board of directors. Gwaltney's grandfather, P.D. Gwaltney Sr., was instrumental in bringing telephones to the county.
Nobody ever dreamed, I guess, that folks someday would just pick the thing up and talk for hours, often about little or nothing.
The Home Telephone Company wasn't the first local telephone company, however, said Lawrence Pitt, senior engineer in the local GTE office. First came the Smithfield Telephone Co., then the Isle of Wight Telephone Co.
In 1901, those two companies merged to form Home Telephone. Pitt has researched the entire history of the companies, considered among the oldest in the nation.
And before the telephone came along, folks in this county used smoke signals, tin cans and string, Janet Jones agreed when asked.
Jones, who retired from the business office in 1992 after 37 years with the company, was instrumental in bringing the retired telephone company employees together for the first time last year.
Jones started with the company when it was still Home Telephone, when she was in high school. She worked after school and on Saturdays. When she got out of high school, Joe Holloway,who is lovingly remembered as the president of Home Telephone and a kind of ``father figure'' to everybody who worked there, hired her full-time.
The other person always remembered as one who taught the employees to care for each other and to take good care of customers, Jones said, is Estelle Livesay, who was the chief operator. Both Holloway and Livesay are deceased but memories of them live on.
Jones said she felt a reunion would be nice when she found that she was always running into former and retired phone company employees wherever she went. And it was always a happy reunion, she said.
But it wasn't easy to get everybody together. That's because several companies have come through since the original Home Telephone Co. After Home, it was Home Tel & Tel, then Contel, then the current GTE. Nobody, it seems, thought to keep records consistently from one company to the next.
So Jones got to work finding people who had worked for one company or the other. Last year, she managed to pull together people representing 1,380 years of service with local phone companies.
This year, she said, they gained a few and lost a few from the reunion and came up with 1,054 years of service. About 75 people attended this year.
Mostly, they just enjoyed getting together. A lot of conversations started with ``Do you remember?'' And most of them did.
Jones remembers that in her early days with the company, operators were called, ``central.''
``And what else did they call y'all?'' she asked Margaret Holland.
``They called us just about anything,'' Holland said, laughing.
In the early days, when folks still had to crank for an operator and shared phone lines with several neighbors, Holland said, they called for advice, for the time, for baking tips. And the operators would even get long distance calls asking ``How do you cook a Smithfield ham?''
``We knew where everybody lived,'' said Rosa Logan, an operator from 1957 to 1981. ``Most of the time it was a fun job. They'd want to know what the weather was, and they would call from way out of state somewhere with just a name, expect us to know where the people were.''
The operator also reported police, fire and other emergencies, Holland recalled. That was before the county had a rescue squad and Bullock's Funeral Home answered emergency calls with the hearse.
``It was the only way we had to get anybody to the hospital,'' Jones said. ``The funeral home transported you.''
Last year, the phone company employees met without a name. This year, they named themselves: Society of Telephone Specialists or SOTS, for short.
The name fits, Jones said, smiling, ``because all of us are very special.''
The group, by the way, is still looking for some ``lost'' brothers and sisters. If you know of a telephone company employee who has worked at the Smithfield office but didn't know about the reunion, call Jones at 357-2612.
{KEYWORDS} TELEPHONE HISTORY
by CNB