December 16, 1980
Former operator kept the switchboard open 24 hours a day
By LISA ARRIGO
Intelligencer Staff Writer
This Christmas as you tuck a dollar bill inside your newspaper deliverer's Christmas card or hide a ribboned surprise inside your mailbox for your mailman, you might want to consider sending a little gift to the telephone company.
Unusual idea?
Maybe, but there was a time when the telephone company was on the holiday gift list. That was the time of the switchboard operator, a time that a 95-year-old Bucks County resident looks back upon with fond memories.
Mary F. Coleman was a telephone operator "before the dial was put in." She was the agent for Bell Telephone Company at its Wycombe telephone agency beginning in 1924. "It wasn't like it is now; people couldn't dial their own numbers then. We had a switchboard and calls would come in with a light and we'd answer them."
At Christmas, most of her customers would remember her with gifts - gifts "from people who appreciated what we (the operators) were doing for them."
Mrs. Coleman was a Bell Telephone Company employee for 20 years. The Wycombe agency was located in her home, where she lived with her husband and five children. She was in charge of making sure the switchboard was kept in operation 24 hours a day.
Mrs. Coleman, who was born in Buckingham Township, said she had "nice, young girls" working for her during the day, but she did not have any help keeping the switchboard going at night. "An operator had to be on (the switchboard) around the clock. Someone always had to be there."
Mrs. Coleman slept on a couch in the switchboard room so that she could place calls at night. Ordinarily when someone rang for the operator a signal or light would register on the board, so she hooked an alarm up to the board that would wake her up when anyone rang for an operator.
Although admitting her task was sometimes a hard one, Mrs. Coleman said in "a place like that (Wycombe), there weren't that many calls after eleven or twelve o'clock."
She did recall, however, one night when the switchboard "lit up like a Christmas tree," and she did not know what request to answer first.
It was the night that World War I was over. Mrs. Coleman said "everyone was calling" and asking questions and spreading news.
She said the same thing would often happen when there was a rain or snow storm.
"That's when it got busy. People would call you for news. Everyone would be calling in and you had to hurry up and answer them all. And especially when there was a fire somewhere in the area!" she said demonstrating with her surprisingly agile hands how she would work the switchboard.
She taught her children and husband how to operate the switchboard and they also helped out occasionally. "My oldest boy didn't like it as much as the girls did ... yet he helped. They all were a big help."
She said the operators she worked with were nothing like the comic eavesdropping, gossiping switchboard operators seen in countless situation comedies on television. Although saying some people claimed they listened in on one another's conversations, she explained the operators didn't because the company gave them specific instructions not to.
"(Today) people don't want everyone to know what they're saying. Well, it was the same way then."
Mrs. Coleman, who now lives at the Garden Court Convalescent Center in Doylestown, also said she became friends with many of the people she spoke to daily. "I knew them by their voice," she said.
Yet when she had occasion to meet someone face-to-face, someone she may have spoken to countless times on the telephone, "They did not always look like I thought they would," she said with a smile.
When she had to leave the Wycombe agency, after it went dial, she said she missed talking to her steady callers.
The telephone company transferred Mrs. Coleman to the Newtown agency until that, too, was closed by the addition of the dial on New- town phones.
Mrs. Coleman's next operator's job was in Langhorne where she eventually retired after 20 years of service with the company. She said before she retired, the Langhorne office also went dial. Later she became the switchboard operator at the George School in Newtown.
"I missed the work. I wanted something to do, and they needed someone. I stayed there about five years," she said.
Although admitting she missed hearing from her frequent callers who fondly called her "Mary," Mrs. Coleman said she was not really saddened when progress and the dial made her job obsolete.
"I think everyone was glad when it went dial, and they could get their own numbers. They didn't need me anymore."
But no matter where Mrs. Coleman was, she said she enjoyed her work because it was "always different because I was helping different people."
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