Stewartstown telephone operators retired when this hand-operated magneto switchboard went out of service and an automatic exchange began operating yesterday at 3:01 a.m. The three operators pictured are, from foreground to background, Mrs. Grace Tarbet, who worked the switchboard eight years, Mrs. Ruth Miller, who has 14 years of service, and Thelma Kerlinger, an operator for nine years. There were six other operators. No longer will a Stewartstown subscriber be able to ask an operator for the special accommodation of routing a call to some nearby place where that subscriber would be visiting. Other operators and their years of service are: Mrs. Evelyn Manifold, chief operator, 27; Mrs. Joyce McClaister, three; Mrs. Mildred Zeigler, four; Mrs. Eva Webb, night operator, five; and Luella Snyder, one.
To remind you how far we have come in communications in the past 55 years–the headline above introduces a full page picture story from the June 19, 1961 Gazette and Daily. Just think, switchboard with live operators to dial phones on party lines to push buttons, then car phones and cell phones the size of a brick. They got gradually smaller until the leap to smart phones, essentially a computer in your pocket. In a few years we will be looking back at them as old fashioned.
The introduction to the article reads: “The next to last hand-operated telephone exchange in York Telephone and Telegraph company’s service area was taken out of operation yesterday when automatic dial telephone service was begun in Stewartstown. The switch cost over $325,000, according to L.E. Grandy, vice-president and manager of the utility. The one remaining hand-operated exchange is located at Fawn Grove and is scheduled for conversion to automatic operations in November, Grandy said.”
The rest of the story is told in the lengthy captions to each photograph, as transcribed above and below.
Mrs. Golda King, who served 35 years as a Stewartstown operator, stamps the beginning and ending times of toll calls on this machine. This operation will now be performed at the York exchange, through which all toll calls from Stewartstown will now go.
Wires, thousands of them, twist and wind through the automatic equipment in the new exchange. The worker is Robert E. Shaull, Brogueville RD 1, an employee of General Telephone and Electronics corporation, which acquired York Telephone in 1959.
Since 1926, the left side of this dwelling, owned by the telephone company and scheduled for private sale, has housed the hand-operated Stewartstown switchboard, which has a 300-line capacity for about 825 customers. There were nine toll connections to the county. York Telephone has serviced Stewartstown since 1905 but there was a smaller telephone service in the area before them.
The automatic exchange is located in this $20,000 fireproof building which is designed so that it can be enlarged. It has a calling capacity of 600 lines with 18 toll connections to the county. Old and new exchanges are both located along Stewartstown’s main street.
The interactive telephone exhibit at York County Heritage Trust’s Agricultural and Industrial Museum is one of the most popular with children. They can operate a real telephone switchboard as well as dial each other up.
