Growing up in Pittsburgh

[John Swindler]

Fred W. Schneider commented:
>
>While we're reminiscing off the subject of Pittsburgh Railways, let me add 
>another.
>About ten years ago, Don Duke and I were vacationing together (I just 
>looked at a slide and discovered how fast time flies ... it was actually 
>October 1983) we managed to flatten a tire on a rental car out in the 
>Mojave Desert ... we were reduced to driving 50 miles per hour on one of 
>those damn doughnuts.
>Stopped in Ludlow, California to call the car's owner in LA to make 
>arrangements to get a new tire.
>
>Guess what?  There was no dial on the pay phone.  No buttons either.  An 
>honest-to-goodness operator run switchboard system where the operator comes 
>on the  line when you life the handset and asks, "Number please."
>
>Dave Garcia told me it was the last or second last non-automated phone 
>system in the United States ... had about a dozen lines on the switchboard. 
>  Was in use 24 hours a day if you let it ring long enough at night to wake 
>up the owner-operator.  How did you dial in from the rest of the world?  
>There was a number in Barstow that was connected to the switchboard for 
>incoming calls.
>
>And how am I going to connect this back to Pittsburgh?  As a nine year old 
>in Penn Hills, our number was 1416-J.  The city had rotary dial phones but 
>we still had operators.  I think it was changed a few months after we moved 
>out in August 1949.
>


Speaking of telephone operators and their demise, I still recall a college 
professor in a business course commenting (and this was over 30 years ago) 
that without automation and investment, AT&T would have had to employ every 
women in the US as telephone operators to try to handle the volume of phone 
traffic.  At least that is what he claimed.

I could try to connect this comment to this mail list by noting that my 
"school bus" to college was the 42/38 and 37 trolley.  But instead, suggest 
that the professor's comments about automation and investment has a lot to 
do with the passing of the street railway - and transit in general - 
industry as we knew it.  (It's that economics topic that we don't like to 
talk about.)

John S.
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