Howell County's Hello Girls

Computers, networking, and social networking have revolutionized how I do research. I started pursuing local history fifty years ago when I was typing on a manual typewriter, and most of my digging for information was in dusty old stacks of paper in some basement. That has all changed, and a lot of these documents are now digitized, and many are in the process of being put online. When I first used the internet, I found eBay to be a great resource for Howell County photos and postcards, which I didn't necessarily want to own, but preserve the image.
 
I've been watching a particular card for nearly a year. It is a "real photo" postcard, popular at the turn of the twentieth century.  One side was a postcard that cost a penny to mail, and the other was a black and white photo. Many real photo postcards do not identify the people, and I find it challenging to figure them out. In this case, I was successful.
 
The card I bought this week had no information besides a pencil inscription that read, "Willa and Blanch, January 29, 1912, The Hello Girls." I was puzzled over what a hello girl was and found that, since the inception of telephone service, the switchboard operators were known as hello girls. Early phone service in Howell County was usually provided for a single town by an entrepreneur. Wires from all the phones in town were brought to a central office where an operator answering you plugged into your line and connected you to another. The hello girls connected other towns and long-distance lines to the caller using the same method. It involved a lot of cords.
 
The job required someone to answer a call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The labor was often divided into two twelve-hour shifts or three eight-hour shifts depending on manpower, or I should say women's power because that is who the majority of switchboard operators were. They were recruited as young as seventeen and required to be at least five feet tall to reach and plug and unplug at the top of the switchboard.
 
A hello girl handled every call, and great trust was placed in their ability to mind their own business and not listen in on private calls. In an emergency in town, they were indispensable in notifying and directing law enforcement to the scene. Their work received praise after the great railroad fire of 1915 in Willow Springs. 
 
With that knowledge, I quickly identified the two girls in the real photo as Blanche Frommel and Willa Redding. Both were single women and ended up working for Willow Springs Telephone Company for twenty years before each married. 
 
They were known as hello girls, though their usual response when you called the central office was "Number, please." Everyone got to know these ladies and became familiar with their voices, and the local newspapers often covered their life events. They were recognized in town and received more credit than the owner or manager of the phone company, I think justly deserved.
In April 1930, the Willow Springs News reported, "Blanche Frommel recently fell and injured herself in such a painful manner that for about a week she was unable to attend to her duties as "hello girl" at the central office. 
 
Willa Redding made the news a couple of years later when she married. In May 1932, the Willow Springs News informed readers, "The bride is the daughter of Mrs. Redding and has grown up in Willow Springs. For the past several years she has been employed as a "hello girl" for the Willow Springs Telephone Company. She is well known and liked by everyone." 
 
The West Plains Telephone Company was owned by Jerome Boyer, stepfather of Robert Neathery, Senior. In December 1912, Boyer announced in the West Plains Journal, "The closing of the city telephone exchange between the hours of 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. Christmas day so that the hello girls might have a few hours off duty, emphasized how very necessary the telephone is to our existence. 'We never miss the water till the well runs dry.'"
 
Robert Neathery remembered his childhood growing up at the telephone central office in West Plains. In the winter of 1917, when three West Plains Hello girls became sidelined with the flu, Neathery recalled, "With all three of the women quarantined at home, we were running into an operator shortage at the exchange. And that was when I got my first hitch at running a switchboard. There was nothing particular in the job that said that it had to be done by a woman. That was when I got to know all the long-distance operators, and they got quite a kick out of me. I was about nine or ten years old at the time."
In 1914, a fire broke out behind the West Plains Phone Company switchboard located on the second floor of the Aid Hardware building, which was a total loss to Aid and the phone company. In the early days, a large dry cell battery had to be maintained in each home or business telephone. A central battery system replaced them but was prone to fire. The Willow Springs Telephone Company above the old locker plant at Main and Center Streets lost its equipment in the same period after a fire destroyed everything. 
 
Most of the small towns in Howell County had their own central office and switchboard. Offices were set up in Pomona and Hutton Valley in 1909. Even the tiny community of Arditta had its exchange. Most long-term residents of the county of more than fifty years remember when an operator asked for the number you wanted to call when you picked up the telephone receiver. The variety of voices at the central office always intrigued me, and I had an image in my head of what the operator looked like, though the only hello girl I ever met was my mother-in-law, Jackie Hinds, who worked in the Willow Springs office in the 1940s in her late teens. 
 
In 1929, William H. Wicks sold his Willow Springs system after operating it for twenty-five years. When he started his system in 1904, he had thirty-seven phone subscribers and had built the system to 400 phones. He sold the business for ten times his investment. The Willow Springs News reporting the sale stated, "No small part of the credit for the popularity of the system has been the work of the telephone operators, the "hello girls," chief among whom is Miss Bessie Meager, whose twenty years of service as chief operator has been characterized by efficiency and courtesy."
 
That's what I like about researching history. You never know where you will find it and, in the process, learn something!
 
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