`I’ve worked on every computerized system there is in the city,” says Callie Beaulieu, a Chicago actress. She is talking about the equipment she has used as a part-time telephone operator before being hired at Responsible Answering Service in Chicago. “I came in here the first day, and I was just like, `What? Does this work? You’ve got to be kidding me.’ “
Forget the cellular phone, the fiber optics, the digital PBX, the wireless systems and, above all, forget that much-hyped so-called information superhighway.
There’s a form of telephone technology that, despite rumors and assumptions of its death, is still around, in use, and living quietly among its much younger and flashier state-of-the-art cousins.
It’s the cordboard.
For those not versed in telephone nomenclature, the cordboard is perhaps best known and remembered as the centerpiece in the Judy Holliday movie “Bells Are Ringing.” Others may remember it as the comedic vehicle for Lily Tomlin’s “One ringy-dingy, two ringy-dingy” character Ernestine.
It has been a long and colorful road for this late 19th Century technology. The venerable cordboard has no time for nostalgia, however. It’s concerned with something much more personal: its own survival.
For the few remaining cordboards in operation (and figures are hard to come by but most estimates put the figure at less than 5 percent) the prognosis is bleak.
No manufacturers of cordboards are left in the United States. Most manufacturers stopped making them by the late 1970s, and by the early ’80s, cordboards vanished completely from the assembly lines. Replacement parts are scarce. When parts are found, locating a telephone repairman familiar with cordboard technology more often than not means locating someone in retirement.
In a much broader sense, the recent history of the cordboard is an almost Darwinian account of survival among the remaining users of this obsolete technology. Of the more than 100 answering services in Chicago, seven of them are cordboard users. Just last year, that number was nine.
“We just take it day by day. Luckily, I’m still holding on to the business,” said Tom O’Meara, owner of Responsible Answering Service. “I might have to drop out if I can’t find the parts. It could be a year and a half. It could be two years.”
Despite the dropout rate, the answering service business across America and Canada is the largest resting place for these antiquated switchboards.
“Our last directory survey for 1993 seems to indicate that about 6 percent of answering services are still using switchboards,” said Pat Shea, director of information services at the Association of Telemessaging Services International in Alexandria, Va.
Statistical trivia to some, but for cordboard users, the number is important; it represents a viable source for parts. “We have to buy everything used from someone else going out of business,” O’Meara said.
O`Meara has three cordboards made sometime in the 1930s, although he’s not sure of their exact age.
Finding matching parts for a cordboard that age is not an easy task. O’Meara said it once took him eight months to replace a broken rotary dial.
Dave Smith, a retired AT&T serviceman who does repair work for cordboards in California, said desperate cordboard owners are easily exploited. “I’ve searched for parts to get an idea of what I should charge people when I work on these things, and a couple of times, I found the prices were way out of proportion,” he said.
Oh, for the good old days
Life used to be so simple. Or so say cordboard owners. That was before the advent of advanced switching systems made the cordboards outdated technology and before the 1984 court-ordered divestiture of AT&T and Ma Bell.
Switchboard owners say that divestiture turned a once familial customer-client relationship into an estranged one.
Pat Kelps, owner of Daily Business Service in Chicago, said she had so much trouble getting someone to come out and work on her cordboard-despite pleas for help-that she took matters into her own hands. “I would hold back payments and then they would call and have an absolute fit because I wasn’t making my payments. I’d say, `Look, this is a two-way street guys. If something is broken or if I need repairs, I need help.’
“Finally, a supervisor came out. She went through the whole cordboard and she looked in there and said, `How long has anybody ever done anything about these? These tubes should be changed and looked at.’ I said, `Oh, really? I’ve been paying all this money for 15 years and I can barely get a guy to come out here and look at a plug.’ Oh, she made all these big plans. She wrote down a whole list of things to repair.
“I never saw her again. Never heard from her.”
After some continued wrangling with the phone company, Kelps said she was able to get a couple of new plugs, and she got current with her bills.
In some cases, cordboard owners say, the repairmen the company sent out were more of a bane than a godsend.
“Most likely, they would do more damage than good. I would have to have a retired Illinois Bell repairman and pay them more to straighten things out,” said another Chicago cordboard user, Rosee Torres, owner of Attorney’s Helper and Doctor’s Helper in Chicago.
Billie Clarke is a little more forgiving when it comes to divestiture. Clarke, of Billie Clarke’s Answering Service in San Diego, is considered by many of her peers the doyenne of the answering service business and the cordboards long associated with it. Clarke’s a second-generation answering service operator and owner; her mother started one of the first 12 answering services in America.
Clarke said she doesn’t fault AT&T for its management strategy post-divestiture, but she does think the corporation as well as others in the telecommunications industry erred in blithely assuming a swift, imminent demise for the cordboards.
“When they had their divestiture, they got rid of people with marvelous knowledge of switchboards. That was necessary for the greater good of that company, but we got sort of stuck in the middle,” she said.
“It’s funny. We’re a pain in the neck. We were suddenly innocently disliked. They resisted giving us much help because they wished we would wake up and give up the switchboards. So they were honor-bound to fulfill their
contracts on this grandfathered equipment as long as we leased it. They were running short on patience. They thought we would just all go away through attrition and they would have no problem, or certainly not have to deal with us as long as they have.”
A whole new business
As of December 1991, however, AT&T no longer had to.
To hear AT&T’s side of this story is to hear of a corporation that before the 1984 breakup could easily afford to support an essentially obsolete technology. But combine the forces of divestiture, a newly competitive market and the ever-dwindling supplies of cordboard parts, and few could argue the inevitable crumbling wall of support for switchboards.
“I guess it’s like going to a Ford dealer and saying, `I’ve got a Fairlane and I want a carburetor for a Ford Fairlane,’ and they say, `Well, I know it’s a Ford but we don’t make it anymore. We don’t support carburetors for Fairlanes,’ ” said AT&T Public Relations Manager Larry Kearney.
In December of 1991, AT&T sent letters to the users of these telephonic Fairlanes, informing them that the cordboard was theirs for the keeping and that there was no one left to service them.
“We’ve been out of luck since 1991,” O’Meara said.
Kearney makes no bones about the fact that the cordboards simply had become an impractical technology to support. “We had to get out of that market because it was not profitable,” he said. “We were no longer a monopoly. Up until that point, there was a certain amount of leeway you could give it, but once we were in the cutthroat free enterprise business in a big way, we had to look at the markets that no longer made economic sense to stay in.”
Cordboard owners dispute not their minority status but rather the seemingly persona non grata treatment that came with it. To them, letters they received officially disassociating AT&T from the cordboards were merely de facto announcements of what they ruefully had known for years: They were on their own.
That unwelcomed independence has fostered a veritable cordboard subculture, albeit a loosely and haphazardly connected one, replete with internal networking, ad hoc methods of salvaging cordboard parts, and at least one grassroots organization-all in the name of survival.
Cord Board Users Group, or C-BUG, was formed in California in 1985. Its purpose, according to C-BUG President David Lloyd, is to add a lobbying voice on the state and national levels, exchange ideas and techniques, and disseminate information on repairmen and parts.
While it is reassuring to know that organizations such as C-BUG exist (although most of its notoriety is on the state level), cordboard users have relied largely upon themselves for sustaining their switchboards, often becoming ersatz technicians and crafty troubleshooters. “The more the years go by,” said Clarke, “the more they have to look to themselves to be resourceful.”
Resorting to cannibalism
A popular survival tactic over the years has been the sacrificing of one cordboard for the sake of another. As the answering service business declines (as many have because of the success of pagers, cellular phones and voice mail), cordboard owners cannibalize one switchboard, donating its parts to the remaining boards.
“When you have five switchboards and you may not have them all filled with accounts, you put everyone on four switchboards, and you have an extra switchboard there full of cords and pieces and parts. You can keep cannibalizing it,” Clarke said.
Some cordboard owners, in desperation for parts, have literally dismantled their cordboards searching in vain for names, initials, insignias-almost any clue-that may lead them to a company still manufacturing cordboard components.
That has led some cordboard owners to the Morey Corporation in Downers Grove.
According to George Grastorf, inside sales manager for the electromechanical manufacturing company, AT&T approached the Morey Corporation and its founder William Morey Sr. in the early ’60s prospecting for a longer-lasting cord reel (the component the retracts the cord back and forth); AT&T wanted a cord reel with a 100,000-cycle lifespan. The Morey Corp., with the help of AT&T, designed instead a 200,000-cycle cord reel, and from then on, Grastorf said, became the main supplier of that component.
Emily Mesics, owner of Chicago’s Forgan Letter Service since 1950, said Morey Corporation supplied her 40-year-old cordboard with reels when she could no longer get parts from AT&T. “I was able to get some reels from the firm in Downers Grove, but not any longer,” Mesics said.
Grastorf insists that the company will still supply cord reels on an individual basis even though they are largely a commercial manufacturing company. “If someone’s desperate, we’ll help them,” he said.
They’re simply outdated
Few people involved in telecommunications 10, 15, even 20 years ago could have ever imagined that the cordboards would still be lurking around today, no matter how tooth-and-nail that existence may be. But the irony lies not in what people prognosticated in the past, but rather what they assume to be fact in the present.
“There are no cordboards anymore,” said Professor A. Michael Noll, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California.
When informed of their existence, Noll has an understandably befuddled reaction. “With modern-day Centrex, almost all the features can be given to you with modern electronic PBX (public branch exchange),” Noll said. “Why would anyone want a cord PBX? I didn’t even know any existed. I haven’t been in any business that’s had one.”
It is exactly these rumors of death that make cordboard owners feel like Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer attending their own funeral.
Aside from the obvious physical and aesthetic differences, what makes the cordboard fundamentally different (and out of date) from modern equipment is the hardwire technology on which it is based.
While telephone equipment of today transfers calls via modern switching systems such as Centrex, the cordboard has a direct copper cable, or “hardwire,” connecting the client and the answering service, so that calls ring both the client’s phone and the cordboard simultaneously.
Cordboard operators are given instructions by the client as to when they should intervene and answer the calls. At that point, the connections are done manually by plugging the cords into the proper line. “Everybody thought hardwire would be a thing of the past by now. So we’re sort of dinosaurs through service,” Clarke said.
It’s not nostalgia
With all of the heady advancements in telecommunications today, it’s hard to imagine the cordboard as a once-mighty staple of the telephone industry. But the cordboards used in answering services today are in fact a vestige of the “Hello, Central” days when the central office and its manual switchboards reigned supreme.
Of course, there are those who scoff at the notion that these antiquated switchboards have any redeeming value vis-a-vis modern telephone technology. They cast off these Luddite notions as a byproduct of overwrought nostalgia or a fear of computers.
“It’s a dying breed. It’s a backwards aspect of the business. They don’t feel comfortable with the (new) technology,” said Roy Emmett, a consultant for telemessaging and voice mail service companies.
But the owners’ fondness for the cordboard often has less to do with comfort zones or unwavering allegiance than it has to do with necessity.
For some cordboard owners, such as Emmie Samolin of A-E-C Office Services in Chicago, converting to computerized equipment doesn’t make sense with their retirements looming on the horizon. “If I were to stay in the business, I probably would have made a change, but I’m going to move back to Colorado and that’s the reason I’m not going to do anything. It would be silly for me to do that,” Samolin said.
For the smaller services, converting is just not economically feasible. “People are not retaining switchboards just doggedly. Some of them have to retain them because they don’t have the bucks to convert to computers,” Clarke said.
Whatever their reasons, cordboard users admit to a sense of nostalgic pride in preserving what may be the last of telephone history’s firsts. Kelps said, “It’s so neat when people walk in here and say, `Oh, my God, I worked on those 30 years ago!’ “
