My father Ralph worked for then Michigan Bell as a Station Installer and later a PBX Installer. He worked the Grosse Pointes and the NE Detroit out of the Valley Garage on St Jean in Detroit. Exchanges were the Tuxedo and the Valley mostly. He was loaned up to Sandusky in 1962 to help prepare for the cutover from manual to dial. That's how my story about the railroad phone at Sandusky came to be.
We lived in Harper Woods and he helped me wire the neighborhood for "Private" Telephone Service when I was younger.
I was so sure that I was going to work for Bell but they weren't hiring as I got out of college. In fact due to their true up at the time 1979 they were only hiring women and minorities they wouldn't even interview any of us. One fellow had a solid 4.0 and he didn't merit an interview. I did work an internship at Bell in their Radio Transmission Engineering group in the AMC Building my last term in school.
So you are probably wondering where did I work. Well I got a job at then Detroit Edison in their Telecom Group. What a rush it was like working for an independent telephone company but with one customer the power company. So many things I got to work in and on because we were underfunded and the red headed step children of the company. I ended up the last 12 years as a Principal Engineer leading a group of three other engineers and several technicians. Together we designed , installed and maintained the corporate telephone system. At its peak I had 37 end offices, 6 tandems and 16,000 stations that were all on network. We built everything as much to Telco spec as possible, 8-10 hours of battery at all switches, generators at all tandems, closed numbering plan that mirrored the PSTN Public Switched Telephone Network. I personally signed the AO-19 that assigned the 10,000 number block 313 -235 to DE minus one number that Bell had given away before the paperwork was dry. When I started we had about 1200 miles of OWL, Open Wire Line and 700 miles of cable some loaded and some not. Magneto telephones working in many of the substations. All that got replaced and modernized.
Its still running but not quite the same but that's neither here nor there. If you are interested look up Telephone Collectors Int. that is where my stories run. Lots of folks out there with switches and equipment running in their basements and barns. Ah good times. Sorry for using so much bandwidth. LOL Oh and Jim did you work for Bell / ATT? Dennis H.
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