Number please ...from tin can to cell tower

By MAUREEN KOEHL 

One of the most knowledgeable and interesting men I had the chance to meet was the late Oliver Knapp of Mount Kisco. “Ollie” Knapp knew more about Mount Kisco and other parts of northern Westchester County than any 10 others put together. He was the Mount Kisco historian for many years and he was also most knowledgeable about the history of the telephone company in our part of the county. He worked for the New York Telephone company for 50 years.

On his mother’s side, Ollie was related to the Todds and was familiar with the Todd Road area. He spent several afternoons guiding me around town. As I drove, he spoke into my tape recorder in his lap, expounding on some of the history of telephone service in Lewisboro. Ollie told me he installed the first telephones at Farvue Farm for Vice President Henry A. Wallace in the mid-1940s. Then he came back 20 years later and converted those old-fashioned phones to dial phones when dials were introduced to Lewisboro in the early 1960s. 

The first phone

Alexander Graham Bell may have invented the telephone in 1876, but it was 20 years later that Lewisboro got its first telephone. Two instances are noted in the history book. One in Vista, at the home of Ed Ruscoe, who lived behind the Vista Market. His phone was installed on the Norwalk-to-Ridgefield Connecticut line. Meanwhile, Cyrus Lawrence’s general store in South Salem boasted a telephone installed that same year. Lawrence’s telephone was hooked into the Ridgefield line. In 1907, another line was run from Katonah to the village of South Salem, the Hudson River Company line. Connecticut lines could not hook into New York lines, which caused a huge problem when the companies tried to set up a party line about 1900. If you wanted to talk east, you used the telephone on the Ridgefield line; if your party was in Katonah, you used the Hudson River Co. instrument and wires. Sound confusing? Well, it was. But in 1912, the New York Telephone Company began to absorb all the smaller independent lines and the Ma Bell was on her way. 

In 1983, Oliver Knapp wrote a one-page history of South Salem’s beloved Lawrence telephone exchange. According to Ollie, “In 1911, John Lawrence, who maintained a farm on Spring Street and Main Streets, allowed the New York Telephone Company to install a single position switchboard on the second floor of his large white farmhouse. Adjacent to the small switchboard room was a bedroom that the night operator occupied when the telephone traffic permitted, during which time a night bell alerted the operator to incoming calls.” 

The late Louisa Tinè, the subsequent owner of the Lawrence farmhouse, described the switchboard room as beautifully oak-paneled and contained a large oak desk and a huge wooden cabinet for the switchboard connections and telephone lines.” A section of the house that included the historic telephone exchange was badly damaged by fire on Christmas night 1982 while the family was away. During the fire damage restoration, the desk was removed but Knapp convinced the Tinés that the “historic” switchboard cabinet should remain in place. “We keep books in it now,” Mrs. Tinè told me. 

Teaching and dialing

From 1911 until Dec. 19, 1939, the upstairs “turn-the-crank telephone exchange provided all the area’s telephone service. At first John Lawrence’s older daughter, Marion, operated the exchange. Later her sister Elizabeth took over with her sister-in-law Mary Lawrence and divided her time between chores and selling butter, cheese, milk and eggs, and running the exchange. Mary Lawrence taught many of the village children, first in the village one-room schoolhouse and then at Lewisboro School. Elizabeth never married, but as the local switchboard operator was the social center of the village, privy to many of the ins and outs of townsfolk’s illnesses, trials and triumphs. 

According to Knapp, some telephone subscribers advised Elizabeth Lawrence of their whereabouts if they were going away. She would take their messages for them while they were away.

In a small town, it’s only right that everyone knows just about everyone else’s business and that was made even easier by the party-line system which was finally set up about 1912 after the difficulty with a multitude of lines and companies. The operator would ring the bell code, a specific number of rings for each household, to alert the home to an incoming call before putting the call through. Listening to conversations was not beyond the nosy Parkers of the community! 

In 1939 the turn-the-crank system was replaced by the new-fangled dial system. The telephone company built a brick building on the corner of the Lawrence farm near the South Salem cemetery on Spring Street where it remains today. Millions of wires come into that little building where once a very simple system flourished. Those early phone numbers had only two digits. When we moved to town 60 years ago, we only had to dial four digits to call another party with the same exchange, i.e., 763 or 533. Even to call Ridgefield one did not have to dial “1” to get out of the state. Sad was the day in May 1987 when the telephone company announced that we had to dial seven digits to call the same friends we had been dialing only four digits to reach. One can only imagine the immense change when the switch was made from the friendly voice of Elizabeth Lawrence to the annoying buzz of the dial tone. Progress is not always pretty! 

'What hath God wrought?'

Now in the 21st century, we are living in the frantic haze of cellphone communication where our phones are inseparable from our back pockets and purses and travel with us everywhere and control our lives. In May 1844, “What hath God Wrought,” was Samuel Morse’s first message on his Morse Code machine that changed human communication forever. 

Is it ironic that what has made communication easier has, in some ways, isolated us more? What would Elizabeth or Marion think? Would they be amazed at the ease and impersonal touch of today’s cellphone system and the fact that we now have to punch 11 numbers to reach our friends? Would they approve of cell towers along our highways, or the lack thereof? Or would the forward-thinking John Lawrence have erected a cell tower right on Echo Farm, in his very own backyard? Ponder that.

Maureen Koehl is the Lewisboro town historian.