Rules of Engagement

Now, way back in 1934 when the Twin Butte Mutual Telephone Company was organized, they had nineteen rules.  Bylaws, they called them.  The bylaws said as how it cost twenty five dollars for anybody to join up with the telephone outfit but since it was hard times, folks had three years to pay it off.  But they had to cough up the dollar twenty a month fee plus twenty five cents a month for maintenance on top of that.  She wasn’t cheap.

Another rule said everybody had to work four days a year digging post holes, resetting poles, stringing wire and stuff like that; whatever needed doing.  If they figured they was too busy they had to pay two dollars a day for each of those four days for somebody else to do the work. Seemed only fair.

Anybody wanting to join up after the company was first formed had to pay for and install their own line and telephone.

So ol man Hoffman, out there, he ran her in a half a mile along the top wire of his three strand barbwire fence.  Jacked up the voltage a bit with a couple more dry cells.  He had two scrawny aspen poles propped up at the road allowance where he ran her up and over so’s he could get his tractor under.  It worked pretty good most of the time but she’d short out pretty quick when a good rain blew in.  Short out the whole party line; not just his own phone.  So they made a rule about that, too.  No fence post lines and you weren’t allowed to the run the wire on no trees either.

There was telephones around, Talk-a-phones, they called them, way before the Co-op phones or Alberta Government Telephones.  Folks rigged’m up on fences so those quarter section lines of barbed wire became conduits linking up lonesome homesteads.

They were great daunting beasts, those bulky old boxes of hardwood, bolted to the kitchen wall.  A wet-cell battery supplied enough juice to send a voice rattling off along the fence line and there was a magneto crank to fire the bell down the line on the phone you were calling.

The fence lines worked sometimes if everybody shut the road gates but communication required shouting through raging wind storm roaring but all in all it was plumb nice to get word of a school house supper, hear your neighbour found his steer or Molly Burton had a baby boy.  A comfort is what it was, knowing you were connected with other folks.

excerpt from Party Line: telephone etiquette for rural folk