Sepia Saturday 267: Large and Small, Radios, Broadcasting

Better late than never, I suppose!  It’s been an incredibly hectic month around here, but I’m still trying to keep up with Sepia Saturday (or Sunday, as the case may be) even if I’ve let the regular blog posts fall by the wayside.  The closest thing I have to this week’s prompt is something rather dear to me that I’ve been itching to fit into a prompt.  In 1925, when my great grandma Olga Powis was only 25, she got a job as a telephone operator.  She continued at that job for 33 years until the system switched to a new system in 1958, making switchboard operators obsolete.  As a single mother who raised my grandpa after his dad left very early on, I’m sure this was a great way to help her support her family.  The photo above shows her at the switchboard, and she took time to write a note on the back (later in life), “June 1955, On the job, Number Please.”

The way my dad tells it, she was quite the handy gal, and would regularly go back behind the board with the hot poker from the fireplace to make repairs, basically soldering back together bits of the board.  The spirit of tinkering with something to get it right, fixing things by yourself, taking things apart to see how they work is definitely alive and well in my family from my grandpa, Olga’s son, to my dad and me and my brother.  For me, it was  empowering, in a way, to know that my great grandma may have helped set the stage in her era, for me to be able to be a woman working with computers and technology.  Whether it’s learned behavior or part of our genetic makeup, I’m not sure, but there are so many stories about all of us in those four generations fixing, tinkering, and taking things apart to see how they work.  It’s nice to think that it might have started with one strong woman who wasn’t afraid to fix things herself.

The article below is about the end of the switchboard system and mentions her by name (along with a photo) and alludes to the fact that the voices of these operators will be missed as people will now be able to dial numbers directly.  (Click the article to see a larger version)