Friday, June 28, 2024
My husband and I were talking about early telephones in Gatesville, and he remembered that the old telephone office used to be in the Bill Herridge Insurance building at 1004 Main Street, in Gatesville. I emailed Bill, and he confirmed that it had been the telephone office for many years, and he had a wealth of information about telephone service in Gatesville. I asked him if I could reprint this information.
Bill Herridge writes:
My office was indeed the location of the Gulf States Telephone Company when it was built in 1939. The previous location was the upstairs area above the Burt Building which the museum now owns. My mother-in-law, Inez Drake, was an operator when this building was built. When the phone company built the new office on Bridge St., they sold this building to Dr. Floyd, my wife’s uncle. When the doctors combined their resources and built a new clinic by the new hospital in the mid 1970’s, I bought the building from Dr. Floyd (Dr. William F. Floyd). So, my wife’s family has been associated with this building since 1939.
War was raging in Europe in 1939. Since this building was to contain all the switching equipment for the Gatesville telephone grid, it was built to withstand a bombing attack. The walls are 18 inches thick, and the ceiling is 22 inches thick, all poured-in-place concrete. When we get a tornado warning, this is where my family and I shelter. The fancy old red Spanish tile roof could be blown completely off, and the building would still be intact.
There are three little narrow windows just to the left of the front door. At one time, there were three phone booths in the lobby, with little windows illuminating each phone booth. One of the original phone booths was incorporated into Dr. Floyd’s current home. He let his four daughters use that as their personal phone. Many old-timers have told me over the years that early in the war, Sunday afternoons would find soldiers lined up all the way around the block, waiting to get to those phone booths to call home. Those were the only three phone booths in Gatesville at that time. Because of that, the front door of this building was never locked.
Since Gatesville has always had a volunteer fire department, the firemen were notified of an emergency by a large siren that was mounted on the roof of this building. That siren was activated by a large switch, which I still have. It was mounted on the wall behind the operators. If someone called in to report a fire, the operator taking the call would leave her seat and walk over and hit that button. When the siren started to sound, volunteer firemen would call the phone office and ask the location of the fire (this was long before two-way radios were available for the firemen.) By that time, the operator taking the original call would have written the location of the fire on slips of paper and handed them to each of her co-workers. Pretty simple but it apparently worked.
When I worked for the Gatesville Messenger as a reporter back in 1975-1977, I wrote a feature story about the old “number please” phone system in Gatesville. I found a few former operators, including my mother-in-law, and I got some pretty interesting stories from them about strange calls for information they had received over the years. One I remember was from someone who called the phone office at 3 in the morning and asked the operator if she knew “What is the name of them people that live next door to them people what has the white Leghorn chickens?”
Gayle Crawford, a museum volunteer, recalls that she was a telephone operator in Emporia, Kansas in the 1950’s. The kids would call her and ask, “Do you have Prince Albert in a can?” and then they would instruct her, “Well, let him out”.
A local doctor’s daughter remembers she would be talking on the telephone to her boyfriend, and the operator would break in and tell her to get off the line because her father had an important call.
A long time Gatesville switchboard operator recalled that customers would call and ask for football scores, a weather report, or what time the bus left for Waco.
Coryell Museum and Historical Center is open Tuesday through Saturday, as is our gift shop. Yearly Coryell Museum memberships are $20 for singles, $30 for families, and $40 for businesses, and include free admission to the museum plus 4 newsletters. Of course, large and small donations are welcome at all times.
Coryell Museum offers area schools and tour groups a delightful, guided tour through the museum with docents at many exhibits. Call the museum at 254-865-5007 to plan a visit.
