{"id":3546,"date":"2013-04-01T16:32:27","date_gmt":"2013-04-01T16:32:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs-dev.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/?p=3546"},"modified":"2013-04-03T19:17:02","modified_gmt":"2013-04-03T19:17:02","slug":"telephone-operators-trained-to-walk-the-high-wire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs-dev.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/2013\/04\/01\/telephone-operators-trained-to-walk-the-high-wire\/","title":{"rendered":"[A Post for April Fool’s Day] — Telephone Operators Trained to Repair Lines"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Southern<\/a>

Southern New England Telephone Operators Practicing their Skills for High Wire Work<\/p><\/div>\n

Telephone operators employed by the\u00a0Southern New England Telephone Company fulfilled an important role for the company with their\u00a0courteous and efficient service at the switchboards,\u00a0but it is\u00a0a little known\u00a0fact that for a short\u00a0period of time, from 1934 to 1937, many of the operators were also trained to work on the wire crews with the men.\u00a0 This was done as a precautionary measure by the company, so that in case of\u00a0times of disaster, such as floods or hurricanes, ample staff was available to repair downed telephone lines.\u00a0\u00a0Shown here are\u00a0operators\u00a0Jeannette Pascal and Eleanor Hennypenny demonstrating\u00a0their\u00a0prowess on a catwalk the company strung between\u00a0their headquarters in Hartford to an adjacent building.\u00a0 Operator Pearl Carpenter, who worked for SNET from 1931 until her retirement in 1968,\u00a0reported to the archives on a recent visit that during the Flood of 1936, when operators were called to assist the men in line repair, she scaled a forty foot telephone pole in heels and stockings, successfully restoring telephone service to thousands in the Greater New Haven area.<\/p>\n

[April 3:\u00a0 If you didn’t realize already, this post, from April 1, was an April Fool’s Day joke.\u00a0 As far as we know operators were not trained to scale the telephone lines, and we know of none who may have done so in heels and stockings.\u00a0 The real story is this: this photograph was taken\u00a0in March 1936 when flood waters covered 1\/5 of the city of Hartford.\u00a0 The streets were so flooded in front of the SNET headquarters that workers were unable to enter the building through the street level entrances, so this catwalk was erected to connect the headquarters building with an adjacent building and operators had to traverse the catwalk to get to the switchboards.\u00a0We don’t actually\u00a0know the names of the two ladies in the photograph — I thought the ruse would be more believable if I could pin\u00a0names to women — and no operator by the name of Pearl Carpenter ever paid us a visit.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Telephone operators employed by the\u00a0Southern New England Telephone Company fulfilled an important role for the company with their\u00a0courteous and efficient service at the switchboards,\u00a0but it is\u00a0a little known\u00a0fact that for a short\u00a0period of time, from 1934 to 1937, many of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-dev.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3546"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-dev.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-dev.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-dev.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/38"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-dev.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3546"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-dev.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3546\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3550,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-dev.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3546\/revisions\/3550"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs-dev.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-dev.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs-dev.lib.uconn.edu\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}