Remember When From the Past--Number Please

Remember When
Thursday, 24 April 2008
Kenna Holm

NUMBER PLEASE

    Remember the days of Number Please . I ve been thinking about the old telephone office and the telephone system we had here in Payson.  The telephone office was on the corner where Willow Creek Boutique is now on Utah Avenue and Main Street. I always wondered how the operators knew which hole to plug the wires in.
    We never had a phone until we moved into town and I thought that was the neatest invention there ever was.  In those days, you would pick up the receiver and wait for the telephone operator to say, “Number Please?”  and you would give them the number you wanted. She would say just one moment or the line is busy .
    Sometimes when you picked up the phone to call someone, there would be someone else talking already. We all had party lines. Some places like the West Mountain had as high as 14 homes on one line. (I ll bet it took forever to call anyone).  I remember we had 4 on our line but the only one I remember that was on it was Hill s. (Rae Ann Page s family) Our number was 94-J then. It seemed all the numbers had a letter with it. When we got married our number was 310-R. Seems funny now but that was how it was. If we had an emergency and our line was busy, we would have to ask them to hang up so we could call in the doctor or fire or whatever we needed. It wasn’t easy and kind of hard on the nerves.
    Erma Barnett Fech was the head operator forever it seemed.  She was the mother of Dale Barnett and Ruth Ann Burton. She was such a talented woman. She could do anything (like her daughter Ruth Ann). She actually started in 1927 and then was promoted to manager later on.  Ruth Ann told me her father died when he was only 35, leaving Erma to raise the two children alone. She would work in the office with the girls on the switchboard and then at night she would take all the calls. Ruth Ann says she was always so tired and such a hard worker.
    On Sundays, they would go to Erma’s sister’s house.  Her sister,  Marian Loveless (Pat Hill s mom) would watch the kids play and Erma would sleep. Because Erma worked all night, they moved into the back of the telephone office in a little apartment and rented out their home on North Main to Don Fuller who was a school teacher.
    Erma was such a talented lady. She was great cook, she could do flower arranging, she wrote road shows and directed plays, she would go around and speak on gems, she sang in the ward choir and as
 Ruth Ann said, she made life interesting.

    Everyone that worked there at the telephone office loved her. She was easy to work for and very fair. There were a lot of different women that worked in the office over the years. Shirlene (Peery) Wood, Marianne (Hillman) Evans, Joann (Richard)Ellsworth, LuDene (Menlove) Perry, Gloria (Smith) Barnett, Maxine Wilson, Margaret Peery, Orpha Curtis and I m sure many more.
    Gloria Barnett told me she was working the night the old Curtis Hospital burned down and how frightening it was to be alone on the switch board.  They would also take the calls for the fire department and set the siren off. The fireman would have to call in so the operator could tell them where the fire was. The had to have code words so the telephone operators knew which ones were really fireman and not just someone being curious where the fire was.
    Remember when the first phones were big boxes on the wall?I do. My grandmother had one of those. You would wind a little handle on the side to get the operator and then hold the earpiece to your ear and speak into the mouth piece on the box. Fun. I loved to pull up a chair and reach the phone. Then came the tall skinny phones with rotary dials. Then the desk square and round phones and so on. We ve come a long way since then.
    It used to cost to call Spanish Fork. In 1950 they no long charged for those calls but it was a long distance call any where else. I remember calling my husband at his work in Provo and it would be like 20 cents for the call when it came out on the phone bill. I m not sure what year they changed and made free calling in all of Utah County.
    We went from the operators making the call for us to the dial system inNovember1960.  We then had the 465 prefix and 801 area code. At first wecould just dial 5 and the number and it would ring but later we had to put the 465 and then the number. Now before long we will have to dial the area code, prefix and number to just make a local call. (so much work).
    Now we have cell phones. I think every man, woman and child has one. You see them plastered against everyone s head. They reach anywhere in the world you want to talk. And I guess you’re not with it if you don t have one but isn’t it fun to remember back when...