Back in August 1979 I had to travel 6,000 miles to learn my own phone number. There’s a story here obviously. Like many of today’s seniors, my boyhood was in the era of ‘crank’ telephones. Years later, good fortune landed
Back in August 1979 I had to travel 6,000 miles to learn my own phone number.
There’s a story here obviously.
Like many of today’s seniors, my boyhood was in the era of ‘crank’ telephones. Years later, good fortune landed me on Telephone Engineer & Management, one of two trade magazines serving the Independent telephone industry. When GTE invited our publication to profile one of its more exotic properties, Hawaiian Telephone, I gladly jumped on an airplane.
By no coincidence, I had grown up in Hawai‘i, my dad a pastor on the very rural island of Kaua‘i before and through WWII. Back then there were no hotels, stop lights, street signs, tourists. And telephone service was provided by locally owned Mutual Tel until acquired by GTE in 1967.
Our 1979 facilities tour included my native island, where Ezra Kanoho was island manager, later to serve as a state senator. One interview was with Service Office Manager Herb Apaka, whose brother had been a star end on our high school football team when I was a teen sportswriter in the ‘40s.
As it was beginning to sound like ‘old home week,’ in walked a petite retiree introduced as ‘your operator in Koloa when you were a boy!’ I stared open-mouthed as Carol Yamamoto recited: ‘Let me think now, Reverend Smith was on Line 31 and number 4W226. In those years we had to memorize all the numbers.’ There were 200 subscribers on 10-party open wire service run through a vintage PBX in this onetime sugar plantation town back in 1941, today the gateway to thriving Po‘ipu Beach resort.
I grew up with a Kellogg magneto—turning one short, two long to ring up the C.C. Cortezans next door. There were no printed directories so I didn’t even know our phone had an actual number. But ‘Central’ did, and she placed our calls by name, gave us time-of-day and even tracked down playmates upon occasion. Truth is, I never knew Mrs. Yamamoto even though we kids bought candy at her father-in-law’s Yamamoto Store kitty-corner from the tiny green building under the monkeypod tree where she worked.
Reflecting back, toll charge to distant Lihu‘e twelve miles away was a dear 15 cents. Calls to O‘ahu over 90 miles of ocean were beamed by RCA AM radio, one of the first point-to-point commercial circuits in the world, later replaced by microwave. During wartime, operators worked fearsome hours. Mrs. Yamamoto told me ‘we thought the Pearl Harbor attack was a hoax. Local traffic got busy and our two inter-island circuits were tied up. Then KTOH confirmed the worst and we stayed at the boards all day.’ Soon the Garden Island became the training site for up to 10,000 troops and my mom, Gertrude, put on a headset as a censor. She monitored GI calls home across the Pacific and hated having to disconnect young men when they unintentionally told a loved one something forbidden.
Dial telephones came to peacetime Kaua‘i in the ‘50s and subsequent upgrades led finally to digital switching. One incident bears telling. Old timers (like me) recall the law suit ITT levied at General Telephone & Electronics alleging they were prevented from bidding for switching tenders from GTE operating companies. Specifically Hawaiian Tel. The legal settlement included one token sale of a digital switch. For years you could drive the main highway past the village of Kilauea on Kaua‘i without noticing the small hut housing the central office. The sales commission went to local rep Tom Smith in Honolulu who worked hard, and futilely, to crack the account only to have a judge come to his aid.
Another interview in that ‘79 assignment saw Community & Government Relations Director Ward Russell describe when he sailed across the 17 miles of channel between Kaua‘i and Ni‘ihau. Bought privately from the monarchy, tiny Ni‘ihau’s several hundred pure-Hawaiian residents had no phones. ‘Back in ‘53 I sailed over there with the owner, Aylmer Robinson. When we landed he sent word back home that we were okay—by carrier pigeon. I mildly suggested we could easily run a line from the dock up to the one village on the island. He said ‘no way!’’ Medical and other emergencies have been by shortwave radio.
Deprived? Who’s to say. Not me.
• Ray Smith is a former Kaua‘i resident who now resides in Wheaton, Ill.
