mcgregor's from senior perspective today we're going back to when peter time to burst on a telephone service the first place was on the german murray property across from the building we are going to talk about now at that time it was a one person switchboard perhaps later some of my guests can tell us a bit more of my guests today are over here is our ivan watson i haven't forgotten and tom day perhaps we can get started on some of this what was the date that the first telephone came to peter's was a perhaps you could tell it was long before my time and there it was up i just want to show you how it writing here and here twenty five cents a lot what before that went down yes really well i am also a telephone and but i'm the one that would send out the bills and my first paycheck was in i worked in pittsburgh with twenty five dollars for the i mean i had  to ring up your own good reason everything how with those lines set up that they could do that from their homes i mean do you remember or anything i listened to i mean if you could you didn't have to get twelve persons on that line it was just like one big happy family you could only you could only call the ones on your own line you had to call the operator to get another line but then it went out to the wires on the poles and each other's rang a lot longer long and short on some of might have been more interesting than others so they'd just stay on the line wire and everything was climbing poles everything you have now is buried plant everything's under the ground everything out of sight plant even the electric everything's under the ground now so it's really changed within the last fifty years the telephone job is much easier in today's light than it was in the early days of the elementary a step to fight the weather and summertime the you know lek tronic where you actually had in this type found you had to brass gong so to speak when i went to this design here this is a three a two when the girls have problems with them they would set them aside and when i came in the morning of the very good times than there we had to we we had some exciting times that we have powers and we had the flags and we had accidents and and i kept the real busy for years when i turned was less than twelve or less sometimes but sometimes it was ten and sometimes it was eleven but seven in the morning and well ok ruth your turn now was called the common battery we had enormous the batteries in the basement similar to your car battery only eight or nine times bigger so there was a power plant to keep the batteries for help i know my sister was she worked down there all set and she told me she often wondered what was on the basement with i was afraid to go down and see that i don't know the ring the machine was down there and the batteries over on to nineteen and down to west mcmurry road and the merry exchange was a big change to go back to the questionnaire when they were saying number one and number two i used to do is ask the operator give me number one and that was a found and generally as the fire was running and it was one two three and then so you could always tell who had the bars finals and as tom said one two and three was in a telephone company and then as a people would get their phone put in they got four five six and i went up like that and that always amazed me all i should know who was a parson early people of the area by their phone number other than the telephone companies changed a lot down through the years the nine for one will cover ten thousand combination of numbers from she rose zero zero to nine nine nine takes makes ten thousand different numbers you've got nine four two nine zero nine zero or two we had to go the todays world it's the eight hundred number in other words the owner or the company pays for the call when you call an eight hundred number they accept the charges rather than you pay for the long distance charges they pay that i worked to the day that the word is was declared in europe and that that was one of the biggest mistakes the telephone company ever made because they had every girl in the office that though i didn't work i sneaked off i said i had worked all the other days i was going to sneak off that day and someone else took your place and well it was i wasn't supposed to be working at the time anyway so but they had plenty of people who work but then i was called but i i was in the home  show you how to operate with foreigners and when when but we when we went over to the other board we got oh no you got more than that we we went to canada bergen was trained because you had to learn you had  learn all those combinations and numbers you had a hundred numbers and then you had to learn all the combinations for one hundred numbers for one hundred numbers with the things and you had you had a and that go from one to ninety nine each block and we've got and you had no numbers there was no numbers on it that's why you had to memorize every one of those numbers you had to know where each one of those numbers was whe so many in each row had in the hundred had me so many and and then when we started we had the one hundred block well you have to know where the push the light came on is that what you're saying yeah you had to know what number that was you had to memorize that what number that was you had to know where that number was in to place the call then somewhere else you know another number yeah then you had to find another number like it got when we were in them with they all men either you had them on the blacks a little flap that fell down the numbers were all on them you had no problems but when you run when we went to the common battery you had them rise each but battery we had to ring for them if you wanted the other party on your line we had to ring it for them they had to hang up we said well you hang up space and then we would ring and but where i mean like when you were before that we didn't go in over it to rent for somebody else we would plug it up with a quote one quarter we'll learn something and then we had to do the same with the common we out around thomas and down the nation way and all around because it cost too much money for you to have a private line was or you had a two party line you had a two party line or you had a four party line where i remember a long time ago we had a neighbor she was an invalid and well if you want to miss anything you just a thing was nice to reminisce the old times they're gone not forgotten that will never return but that's why we have it on tape measure while we have it on tape and we can see it maybe in years to come that i imagine the save remember the old linemen back during the depression they were the eighteenth tee stock was forced on they say well we'll give you ten dollars but you have to take half of that in a candy stock and that you did i mean not everybody is very got them out there one time they got way out beyond thomas some place and they risk was getting late it was getting dark and we said aren't you coming in and they said no we have so much to do and so we told him that with indians out there they better