MONROE — History speaks to the current generation at Northeast Louisiana Telephone Co. One speaker is former party line operator Dorothy Norsworthy George.
Back in 1947, when the company started up, she and other women operated the switchboard in a back room in an owner’s home, connecting people in Collinston, Jones and Bonita to each other.
Most of the ladies who ran the switchboard over the years were members of the Norsworthy and Hopgood families, now under third-generation owners Rector Hopgood and her son, Mike George.
“Collinston was mostly run by strong women, because the men were all in the fields or International Paper,” Dorothy George said in a December interview with The News-Star at The Arbors of Bastrop, where she now lives. “My mother and Rector’s mom and their friends ran the business office of the Bastrop and Bonita exchange. I started off as a teenager helping put on the switchboard.”
Northeast Telephone now offers Internet and cable TV as well as local and long distance telephone service.
Back then, every phone call came through the switchboard. Someone had to be there 24 hours a day, seven days a week. George said the operators knew just about everything that was happening in the small communities — and with party lines, so did just about everybody else.
“Think about it — everyone had a certain ring, so after a while, everyone knew who was calling who,” she said.
Every phone connected to the system rang at each call. The sound and number of rings showed who it was for.
The telephone company was on Main Street and within “hollering distance of all of the businesses. If you were out hanging clothes someone might step out and yell, ‘get in there so I can call Bastrop.’” George said. “You knew everything that was going on and all their business, but you were not supposed to tell.”
Then, as now, connectivity could be a challenge. The little villages were wired to the phone lines, but rural residents had to wire themselves.
“If you lived in the country, you had to make your own phone lines and connect them into the switchboard,” she said. “A little recycled phone wire put on a sweetgum tree, a sapling or using a stick would do. Most people went over to the telephone company in Bastrop and got their discarded line and posts and went from there. It was a much simpler time. Before all of the high tech, it was make-do in the ‘40s.”
The switchboard operators were the keepers of the community information, because the communication went through them.
“It was commonplace for someone to dial the operator to locate someone. We knew where everyone lived and if they had a phone or how to get a message over,” George said. “A family member might call and ask when someone was coming home, and we might know if we were the person who answered the phone and connected them.”
George worked many years at the switchboard before moving to customer service. Not too long ago, when climbing the stairs to the office became difficult, she decided to retire.
Her granddaughters — Erin a student at Louisiana State University, and 17-year-old Christine, a student at Ouachita Christian — work at the family business.
Now switches are digital, signals are wireless, and voices are automated. But the history lives on.