telecom@eecs.nwu.edu (TELECOM Moderator) (12/08/89)
Forty-eight years ago today, December 7, 1941, was the day King Roosevelt II said would live in infamy forever....and it was a day not to be forgotten by the thousands of telephone operators in the old Bell System, either. When the news reached the mainland a few minutes after the attack on Pearl Harbor (it was at 7:30 AM Hawaii Time; 12:30 PM EST), *everyone* jumped on the phone to tell their neighbors. In those days of mostly manual telephone service, with well-trained operators moving cloth cords in and out of jacks on switchboards very rapidly, Sunday was usually a slow day, and smaller than usual (for a business day) staffs were on duty. In Chicago, which at that time had a mixture of dial exchanges and manual exchanges (about a dozen dial exchanges downtown, but manual service elsewhere in the city and suburbs), phone service came to a virtual halt about noon when the crush of calls based on the news report from Pearl Harbor generated a record volume of traffic in the history of phone service in our town. Chicago was no exception to the rule: all over the United States, telcos sent out urgent messages to every available employee to come in and help 'work the boards'; and even with a full week-day complement of operators by later that Sunday afternoon, delays of twenty minutes just to reach the operator requesting 'number please?' were not uncommon. In Chicago, the telco went on 'emergency calls only' status beginning about 2:00 PM and remained on that status until mid-day Monday, when the volume of calls had dropped back to a manageable level. The operators answered each call by saying 'We can only handle emergency calls at this time; (pause)....call later please'; then yanking the cord and moving on to the next in line of dozens waiting. Although the area around Pearl Harbor suffered extensive damage to telecommunications lines, the small exchange there stayed open throughout the bombing and managed rather well. (See Telecom Archives file 'pearl.harbor.phones' for specifics). Calls to Hawaii were blocked by the overseas operators in Oakland, putting them through only when the operators at Hickam Air Force Base (where the exchange was then located) told them they could handle more calls. Nothing like the volume of calls that day had ever been seen before; nothing like it was seen again until the day in November, 1963 when JFK was gunned down. Patrick Townson