I was a telephone operator for PT&T in Santa Rosa, Calif. from ‘76 thru ‘78 and I worked at a cord switch board. Even in the 70’s there were still many long distance calls that still required operator assistance and those of us “0” operators placed those calls for the customers from our cord switch boards. All International calls, Mobile calls, marine calls, coin telephone calls, collect calls, person to person calls, calls LD calls from Hotels and Motels and the County Jail were placed by the operator.
We also still had some customers in area code 707 that didn’t have dial telephones, they were on rural lines that required EVERY call to be placed by the operator. My family lived in such an area in the 60’s. We had 5 other customers on our party line and you had to listen for the ring in order to tell if the call was for your home. Our number was Russian Gulch #3 and our ring was one long and one short. To place a call you’d lift the receiver and listen to see if anyone else was on the line, in which case you’d have to hang up and wait until the line was clear and the operator would come on the line, announcing Operator, then you’d say, operator this is Russian Gulch #3 and I want to call Seaview #10 and the operator would ring down your your call for you. When I turned 13 in February 1964 my Mom was in Brooklyn, NY visiting relatives. When she called me to wish me a Happy Birthday it took her almost an hour to get the Operator to take her seriously that she was calling Russian Gulch #3 via the Santa Rosa Calif operator, she thought Mom was pulling her leg.
There were no cell phones then and almost every call that wasn’t within your local area was a Long Distance call, and they all cost plenty. Customers in our area could direct dial intra and inter state LD numbers using 1 and then the area code and the line number, but for most of the 707 area code these calls still required some minimal operator assistance via the CAMA (Centralized Automated Message Accounting) operator. When an operator was working the CAMA board we would receive a beep in our headsets to indicate that a customer was on the line, then we would say, your number please (the number they were calling from) then we’d key in their number, say thank you and immediately get the next beep for the next call. A CAMA operator would key in an average of 600 telephone number per hour. This process is how these customer direct dialed calls were billed, so if a dishonest person gave the number for someone else as there number then that poor bastard was billed for the grifters call, but eventually Mother Bell caught up with these miscreants and billed them anyway, so the payment was just delayed by their dishonesty.
Being a telephone operator was a very fast paced and interesting job, the time really did fly by when you were at the switch board.
In the time period being depicted in the YT video many locals had designated LD operators that were reached by dialing 113 to reach the LD operator.
Additionally, during the time period that I worked foe Ma Bell there was no 911 yet for emergency call, and the “0” operator handled ALL emergency calls and remained on the line until the emergency help arrived, Some of those call could be quite upsetting needless to say.
It was a very different time when the telephone wasn’t taken for granted and every time it rang you rushed to answer it. There was no caller ID and very few crank calls. Today my telephone can ring several times a day and it doesn’t get answered because 99% of the calls are from fraudsters. It’s a different world indeed.
Eddie
www.automaticwasher.org
