Memories of the Telephone Company

By Alice Sams Montgomery, February 8, 2002

The late Alice Sams Montgomery wrote this story at the request of Jane Borg, Historian at PVHA. Alice was a PVHA volunteer who was a telephone operator in 1955 at Pacific Bell in Watsonville.

In 1955, I married a Hartnell College student recently back from the U.S. Navy serving in the Korean War. It was agreed I would stop going to Hartnell and become fully employed so he could continue his studies. Besides being a full-time engineering student, he also held down two jobs: one as a school bus driver for Salinas Unified School District, and the other as a switchman for Southern Pacific Railroad at Watsonville Junction. Just about the only employment in Watsonville open to young women was with Pacific Bell Telephone as a long line operator.

On June 20, 1955, I began my employment at the telephone office on Van Ness Street, now called Rodriguez. There was a class of new operators reporting for training that day. Our trainer was Evelyn Bontadelli. Chief Operator was Mrs. Rosa and Evening Chief Operator was Alice McGinnis. We trained for about 15 days before being attached to the “board” to take real calls. We were given all kinds of test situations to handle but by far the one scenario that scared us all was how to take a call from Leo Westwater of Granite Construction. Mr. Westwater was notorious for talking fast, giving little information and then hanging up in your ear.

When we were finally pronounced fit to assume a chair on the long-distance board it was easy to fit in because all the seasoned operators were kind and helpful. There were at least 20 operators working on a weekday since all long-distance telephone traffic came through that office. There were fewer stations filled in the evening, and overnight there were two operators on duty. The new hires usually got the evening hours and the split shifts since they were the most undesirable hours. I settled into a split shift of 9a.m. to 1 p.m. and 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. For most of that time I worked at the desk called Rate and Route: I gave out local number information and priced the metered tickets– a ticket for each call made through the office that day. I also had the job of pulling the tickets for the dreaded observer in Santa Cruz who plugged into our positions to monitor our “Tone of Service”. That was a favorite Pacific Bell saying.

There was usually something wrong with the pulled ticket and the Chief had to have a stern talk with the offending operator about doing better. Our office also got marked down in points if there were too many breaches of Tone of Service.
When the original phone building was built on Van Ness Street, it was only two stories. The business office covered the ground floor and the long-distance work was done on the second floor. In the early 1950s, dial phones came to Watsonville and a third floor was added to hold the switching equipment. During the 1955 flood, the main entrance to the building was blocked by sand bags so high the women had to have help crawling over them. During that disaster all the off-duty operators reported without even being called and others brought food and coffee because we were the lifeline to the outside world at that point.