|
Golden telephone
service 100 years old Saturday
August 31, 1979
By Elizabeth Wilkinson
It was a race down to the wire, so to
speak.
Telephone service in Golden celebrates
its 100th birthday Saturday and it was on September
1, 1879, that Golden residents saw not one, but two
telephone systems established to serve them.
The run for Golden's telephone contract
was part of a rivalry that developed in Denver
between representatives of the Bell Co. and the
Western Union Telegraph.
Frederick Vaille, who saw the
possibilities of "squawk boxes" in a state rich with
massive gold deposits and overnight millionaires,
had established the Denver exchange in February
1879.
No sooner had Vaille started putting out
heavily grounded lines than Western Union put in a
competitive exchange in Denver, under the name of
Colorado Edison Telephone Co.
The two firms met head to head in a race
to establish service for Golden, which the Bell Co.
won when the first line went in at 7;30 p.m.--just
10 minutes before Edison completed its line.
Thirty-five subscribers signed up for
the newly completed service, at $60 a year for
businesses and $48 a year for residences.
The first manager, or head operator, of
Golden's phone system was G.W. Peck, who was
welcomed in the Sept. 17, 1879 issue of The
Transcript as "one of the pleasantest gentlemen
it has been our good fortune to meet in a long
time."
Only three weeks after the telephone
service was established, the "Golden Telephone
Dispatch Co.," as it was called then, was described
in the Sept. 24, 2879 Transcript as a solid
institution:
The Golden Telephone Dispatch Co. is now
one of the solid institutions of our city, and
one that we could hardly get along without, even
after our short experience of its usefulness.
Subscribers at a distance from the
business portion of the town of course find it
of the greatest utility, as for instance, the
various smelting works, brewery, firetruck
works, coal banks, etc., as well as those
desiring to communicate with Denver, Black Hawk
or Central. Those not subscribers can also be
accommodated at a trifling sum for messages sent
to any part of town or to other towns connected
by the system. Parties not subscribers can send
messages from the general office, Everett's
bank, or from J. D. Babcock's at the C.C.
passenger depot. It is not stretching the matter
at all to state that the Bell Telephone is
veritably the biggest thing in the mountains.
The Transcript may have hailed
the phone system as the greatest boon since the
discovery of gold, but for many in the 1880s, the
telephone was something to be avoided.
Retail grocers would seldom subscribe to
a telephone because, they said, women would call and
ask for the delivery of a 2-cent yeast cake.
Dry goods stores--except the largest
ones in Denver--wouldn't allow a telephone for fear
that customers would demand the delivery of a spool
of thread in a hurry, or some such thing.
Even doctors were reluctant to have
telephones in their offices. They would take a phone
only at their residences, at first, and then depend
on a drug store near their offices to transfer
messages from their patients. Many banks refused to
subscribe, claiming that their businesses were of
such a confidential nature that the telephone would
have too little privacy.
Confidentiality was in short supply,
too, on Golden's party lines. One such party line, a
longtime Golden native remembers, was 439. Although
listening in on local gossip "wasn't ethical," she
says, "don't think people didn't do it."
Golden's telephone operators handled
calls for years out of the brick building on
Washington Avenue between 13th and 14th streets. The
"hello girls," as they were called, were ready to
hook up with Golden exchanges or--if they knew the
caller--would relay such information as who was on
vacation, or at the store. The Transcript's number
at that time was 78.
Golden's longtime telephone manager was
Thomas G. Garrison, who retired in the early 1940s
with more than 40 years of service.
In 1955, Golden moved into automation
with the introduction of the dial system and the
locally used Crestview "CR" exchange.
"We hated to see the operators go,"
remembers longtime Transcript columnist Virginia
Weigand, "because we lost our personal touch with
the corporation."
The phone service has steadily grown
with the area, until it now accounts for 4,721
subscribers on the 278 exchange and 6,869 on the 279
code.
That may sound like small change when
compared with the 7 million Mountain Bell telephones
in the company's eight-state region, but, on a
personal basis, the telephone has become an integral
part of every facet of human life.
Back to
Golden Transcript Articles
|
