Telephone operator remembers her days at Northwestern Bell
By Bill Vossler
When Mary Rethmeier of St. Cloud worked as an operator for Northwestern Bell in the late 1960s, to talk to a customer, she pushed a lever forward. “If I pulled it back, I could hear the conversation. One time a conversation went on so long that I checked to see if they were no longer talking, and realized a Top Ten FBI Wanted person was on the line, and in a local motel. I called the manager over, and told her, but she said we couldn’t do anything about it. We cannot listen in, and we did not hear that. It was never recorded. That criminal was not arrested in St. Cloud.”
That was but one of the many experiences she had while working as an operator from June 1967 until the fall of 1972.
“The St. Cloud Northwestern Bell operators worked on the second floor of a building near the St. Germain pedestrian mall. The first floor was all men who kept everything related to the telephones going. To get up to the second floor, we women telephone operators needed a code for the door to a set of stairs. Our locker room held our coats, personal items, and personal telephone headsets.”
A Little History
In high school, Mary said she realized she and her three siblings would have to earn their own money for college. “As a senior working at the Sweden House pouring coffee I decided I needed a really good-paying job if I was going to go to college.”
That led to a test to be a Northwestern Bell operator. “That involved speed and accuracy with numbers, looking at four or five numbers on one side of page, turning it over, and in so many seconds writing the number down without looking back.”
The week of training was very thorough, Mary said. “We were trained how our voice should sound, not too loud or too screechy, and to speak slowly so people would understand you. I didn’t have a lot of trouble with that. Most of the week was spent learning to operate Information, 411, and the main Long Distance Board.”
Both she and her sister passed the test and got operator’s jobs. “We were both going to school at St. Cloud State University full time, so together we bought a Volkswagon Beetle, which we shared, along with monthly car payments of $69.50. We had to figure out navigating different hours of working and different hours of school. In the summer I worked 40 hours a week, 20 during the school year.”
Working as Operators
While on the job, an operator stared at the Main Board, watching for plugs to light up indicating an incoming call. “When a light went on, meaning a call was coming in, we plugged the back cord of a pair into the light and answered ‘Operator.’ The caller told us the telephone number they wanted to call. As we listened, we filled in bubbles on a computer card, using a new card for each call. If the call was for a specific person, we wrote their name at the top of the card. As we put the front cord in an empty outgoing line, we’d ask the caller’s number and bubble that on the card. When the party answered, we closed the lever, stamped the card to start timing, and filed the card in a slot next to that pair of cords.”
Sunday evenings the shift could be busy. “Students returning to college called their folks and asked for themselves, and when the parents said they weren’t there, and realized the kids had returned safely to school, we said ‘Thank you very much,’ and disconnected. We knew what the students were doing,” Mary laughed.
In a person-to-person call, Mary asked for the person the call was intended for. “If they were there, the call started. If they weren’t, I’d say ‘Thank you very much,’ and disconnect. We then entered a prescribed abbreviation to explain why the call failed and file it above our station. If the phone was busy, wrote ‘busy,’ and encouraged the caller to try again. Then we filed the card and looked for another light.”
She had six slots and six matching pairs of cords she could handle at once. “Then your board was full. So you’re watching all the connected calls, and when a light went out, I disconnected both cords, pulled out the card for that call, and placed it above me, where someone would come along and pick it up.”
If either light on one call went out, Mary said, “I took the card out of the slot and time stamped it again. Meantime I am helping other people, watching all the lights, or taking other calls. Our quota was fifty calls an hour, which kept us really busy.”
If nothing interesting was happening, Mary said she got bored. “If all the regular calls went through, I played games with myself, seeing if I could do 60 calls an hour, and pretty soon 75.”
But no good deed goes unpunished. “The shop steward came and said, ‘Cut it out. You’re making the rest of us look bad. Stick to the quota.’ We were college kids, but the other operators had full-time jobs, making more money, and had good hours with their seniority. I didn’t want to disrespect them. At the busiest, 25 women worked at one time as operators.”
Mary also had to do “Information,” for people who dialed 411 for the information operator. “People said what they wanted. We had the numbers for every hotel, many restaurants, the hospital, and several popular bars memorized from lots of use.”
She said one guy from Clearwater went to the bar every night. “And every night someone would call the bartender and ask for him. The bartender yell out, ‘Is Joe Blow here?’ If nobody answered, he’d say, ‘I don’t hear anybody,’ and hang up. A nightly deal.”
She said the operators also knew all the long-distance prefixes because they heard them so often. “Growing up in Thief River Falls, Ophelia was the telephone operator from her home office. For a call she ran in and answered the switchboard, where somebody would say ‘Call whoever.’ Ophelia always knew where everyone of the 1,500 people in town were.”
“If people calling me didn’t have the number, or lacked information, I had to research to find the answers, like checking several nursing homes to find a certain person. When we found the person, the caller really appreciated it. That made it nice.”
During those days, using the telephone was pretty serious, Mary said. “People couldn’t often afford to call long distance. We also handled many calls from phone booths.”
The company had a strong union, the Communication Workers of America. “Daytime hours were mostly given out by seniority, so in the summer we worked split shifts, 8-12 a.m. and 5-9 p.m., or 10-2 and 6-10. We were locked in the second floor with only women, so oftentimes I would work four hours, swim with a friend at the lake, and come back looking like a drowned rat, but nobody cared.”
Mary said they were busy most of the time. “Different states sent their soldiers to Camp Ripley for a week’s training. “Evenings they called back home. The lines were long. Sometimes the next guy in line told us the phone was so hot they could hardly hold it.”
Mary also had to figure the cost of the call. “We knew the basic price for a three-minute call, and each coin denomination had a different ding, so we added those amounts in our head. I would have to tell the soldiers their time had run out, so they had to put another fifty cents in, or whatever. We kept track of that too.”
Equipment went out occasionally. “The downstairs guys kept everything going well, fixing all those cords. If a board went out, with the usual 20-22 operators, they would be sent to another board for the rest of their shift.”
They did not have their own individual operator’s board. “If you came in at 8:59, operators ready to go home or on break had colored cards above their position, so we relieved them, the going-home people first. You finished their calls, and kept working on what had been their board. Every two hours you put up a colored card so you got a 15-minute break, and someone relieved you. But if you came to work late, you got a demerit on your personal file.”
For ambulance calls, operators had to check which company was next. “A chart on the wall indicated whose ambulance’s turn it was to make sure we didn‘t have a favorite one that we called all the time.”
One night Mary worked all night long. “I worked alone from 2-6 a.m. That was the first time I discovered what kinds of things went on in St. Cloud, a call about a peeping tom, people pounding on doors, Before that I was just an innocent and naïve school girl.”
Mary said during Christmas she and Becky spent Christmas Eve with only the six members of their family. “Some operators got assigned holidays like Christmas, and wanted to be with their families on Christmas day. If we took their shift, we got paid 3 ½ times the hourly rate. That meant we could buy very nice gifts for our family, and allow other workers to be home with their family. We did it for Thanksgiving too.”
The End
When Mary told management she was going to resign and teach, “They asked me to stay on, saying I was management material. But because my father worked for NW Bell for many years, I knew they transferred people all over the country. Some workers lived in four or five different cities while raising families. I knew I wanted children, and didn’t want to move them to different towns and schools, plus I had gone to school to learn to teach.”
Which she was already doing as a senior. “During my junior year I was one of 16 juniors chosen for a position teaching at Campus Lab. They said, ‘For your senior year you should teach at Campus Lab, reading, math, shop, art, all the levels. No student teaching or 400 level classes.’ So when Northwestern Bell offered me a job, I had been teaching for a year, was excited about the classroom, and knew that was what I wanted to do. I taught in the school district for 34 years, and never regretted leaving Northwestern Bell, even if I earned much less money.”
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