"Answering the Call"

An early Kenai Peninsula phone bill--for Warner Petty of Homer, June 1962.

ANSWERING THE CALL

JULY 2010

The object in the wooden shed sitting just off Smith Way, to the west of the Y in Soldotna, was one-of-a-kind in this tiny community in 1952. Inside the 10x12-foot structure was Soldotna’s lone telephone, and anyone wishing to make a call had to come to step inside the shed.

The telephone—the old Army field variety, with a switch to push in one direction for talking and another direction for listening—hung from one interior wall. Connected to the instrument was a string of Army phone wire that wound out of the building and traveled along the road system all the way to Kenai, where an operator stood by 24 hours a day in the Kenai Telephone Company building.

The phone in that Soldotna shed, which sat on land deeded for phone service by Jack and Dolly Farnsworth, was free to the public but was good only for calling any party in Kenai who happened to also have a phone. Finding phone owners in 1952 meant slim pickings.

The telephone wire had been laid by Morris Porter, who, along with Chuck Brady, had begun Kenai’s first phone service just a few months earlier. According to longtime Soldotna resident Al Hershberger, phone service was appreciated in the early days, but the system was notoriously unreliable.

“In some places, it (the wire) ran through culverts,” Hershberger said. “With high water it would short out, so outages were frequent. Occasionally a moose would get tangled up in the line.”

When the Soldotna-Kenai line—or any other line, for that matter—went down, it was Brady’s job fix the problem. However, when he was busy elsewhere, his wife, Kitty, sometimes had to go out on repair runs, according to her entry in Once Upon the Kenai. In addition to running a cab service with Porter, Chuck Brady also drove a school bus, so Kitty frequently drove out to locate and splice together the broken line.

According to Kitty, she and Chuck started Red’s Cab service in Kenai in the fall of 1951, and they hired a man named Buddy Wetbrow to string some telephone wires to each bar in town and to the Wildwood M.P. gate, figuring that this rudimentary communications system would improve their business. The following year, when the Porters moved to Kenai, the Bradys brought them into the business.

Bertha Porter’s own entry in Once Upon the Kenai offers a slightly different version of the story. According to Bertha, she and Morris started the cab service with the Bradys, and both of the Porters drove cabs. They also were involved, she wrote, in stringing wires and installing field phones in businesses that had the most potential to increase the need for taxi rides.

The Bradys lived above Kenai’s old territorial schoolhouse and offered 24-hour phone service, which was enhanced in

After the single-page, card-stock directory that appeared in the Cheechako News earlier in 1961 came
this first "real" (and well-used) directory, created the Trans-Alaska Telephone Company.

1954 by the construction of a new phone building and the purchase of an “obsolete” switchboard from the Homer Telephone Company.

Also starting that year in Kenai was long-distance service, via the Wildwood Army Station. Kenai residents wishing to call Outside could come (for one specified hour in the morning and another in the afternoon) to the phone company, located diagonally across from the Rainbow Bar. There, in a private booth and with the help of an operator, they would be connected to Wildwood and then to their party in the States.

In 1956, the Bradys and Porters made a deal: The Bradys would assume full control of the taxi service, and the Porters would assume full control of the phone service. It was after this, according to Bertha Porter, that the actual Kenai Telephone Company began, when she and Morris took out a $2,000 personal loan—after being turned down by a bank—and established the business, complete with a system of billing.

One of the Porters’ first operators was their daughter, Ami Jo (now Rediske), who said that eventually they were also able to offer overseas connections, via the White Alice system, to their Kenai customers.

In the summer of 1959, Carroll Knutson (then Madden) became a part-time switchboard operator for the Porters. Knutson’s family had recently settled along the Sterling Highway eight miles south of Soldotna, and she had just completed her sophomore year of high school. Because her father wouldn’t allow her to get her driver’s license, she was forced to make alternate living arrangements in order to take the job.

Knutson worked four nights a week, from midnight to 7 a.m., and she stayed with the family of Civil Aeronautics Administration employee Carl White during those periods, going home only when she was not working. When her junior year began, she worked for part of the first semester before quitting so she could concentrate solely on schoolwork.

On school days when she was working, she man the switchboard all night and then attend school for a full day before walking over to the Whites’ home to sleep until it was time to go to work again.

Because of the time of day she worked, her job at Kenai Telephone involved mainly fielding calls for taxi service. The phones in Kenai at that time were mostly on party lines, and so phone numbers were accompanied by a pattern of long and short rings. When someone picked up a phone to make a call, Knutson’s board alerted her and she in turn connected one male jack of a two-jack cord circuit to the female jack corresponding to the caller.

At this point, caller and operator could speak to each other. The caller would identify whom he or she was calling, and Knutson would insert the other male jack from the cord circuit in the appropriate female jack, thereby connecting both parties.

However, since the recipient of the call was on a party line, the phones of everyone in the party—sometimes 6-10 other families and/or businesses—would ring simultaneously. Consequently, Knutson had to ring the correct pattern (two long rings and one short, for instance) in order to alert the correct party. It was a common practice in those days, Knutson said, for people to listen in on each other’s phone conversations.

Because of the phone office’s proximity to the Rainbow Bar, Knutson had an agreement with the bartender of the establishment: “Drinking and fishing didn’t get invented recently,” she said. “These guys would come in after midnight, you know, and so this bartender said, ‘If you feel like you’re in trouble because of one of these guys coming in, you ring the bar.’ And I did that a couple of times, and the bartender would come over and be a bouncer on my behalf. It didn’t take him long to get over there.”

Another part of the phone company was its telegram service, so Knutson had to learn to operate the teletype, which routed all messages through a soldier stationed at Fort Richardson in Anchorage. Most of the telegrams, she said, were business orders to Outside companies, and she remembers the time she made an error—and heard about it quickly.

As a teletype operator, she had to punch in a series of numbers to indicate the sender and another series to indicate the recipient, and after she completed the numbers for an order of meat from a wholesaler in Seattle, she tried to type “Please ship”; however, she accidentally typed a “t” instead the final “p,” and she almost immediately received a response from Fort Rich: “You can’t say that in a telegram.”

By late 1959, as Knutson’s operator career was winding down, a big change in telephone service was announced in an open letter in The Cheechako News. John E. Field, president of the Trans-Alaska Telephone Company, told readers that his company had purchased the private Homer and Kenai phone businesses in May and were planning a major revamping of service and equipment.

According to Field, the new phone utility was expected to be up and running by Oct. 1, 1960, with full service to not only Kenai, but also Soldotna, Kasilof, Sterling, North Kenai and “all homesteads and roads in the greater area.”

The first peninsula-wide phone directory, 1962.

Because none of these places would be incorporated until the following year—and then only Soldotna and Kenai—there was no tax base to draw upon for funding, so Trans-Alaska had spent about $25,000 of its own money on the rehabilitation and repair of existing facilities and equipment.

In October 1960, the new system came online, and the Cheechako published the area’s first-ever phone directory: a single-page card-stock insert in its paper. On May 6, 1961, Trans-Alaska published its own first “temporary” directory, followed by a more complete and permanent edition in the fall.

And in 1962, AVA Publications showed that it recognized profit potential when it saw it, and published the first Kenai Peninsula directory, complete with Yellow Pages, and an “Anchorage Classified and Buyers Guide.”

Meanwhile, the single-telephone system in Soldotna went the way of the dinosaur, and, although its evolutionary replacement was a definite improvement, no-cost service was also a thing of the past.