VINTAGE VEGAS

Operator kept callers connected

In June 1953, I stepped off the train from Utah and walked into a job working as a long-distance operator for the Southern Nevada Telephone Company located at 5th Street (now Las Vegas Boulevard) and Carson Avenue in downtown Las Vegas. Theirs was a family owned business that had just separated from the Nevada Power Co.

At that place and time the telephone company was the heart of the town and the town was booming. The test site was busy doing its atomic testing, and troops were being stationed at Desert Rock, Lake Mead Base and Nellis Air Force Base.

We didn't have dial telephone service at that time, so all calls had to go through the operator. Local calls from pay phones cost 5 cents. The hotels each had their own direct lines to our long-distance switchboards, and Howard Hughes had his personal line directly to us. Needless to say, we didn't let that light stay on too long!

Our motto was "courtesy, accuracy and speed." We would work as long as necessary to get people through to the number or person they were calling. We were required to get the calling name on each call that was placed, so we became very familiar with all our Las Vegas customers. Sometimes we were so busy it took 20 minutes to get a station call through to Los Angeles. Our customers were so patient in those days!

We went dial in August 1955. During that time I only had one customer who had a problem. She didn't know how to dial the dash in the number.

Up until the 1980s, we were the link between the customer and emergency services. We stayed on the line until the customer was connected to the police, fire department, ambulance, etc., sometimes having to console or calm distraught customers during the wait. During the MGM Grand fire, the telephone operator was the only contact some of the hotel guests had.

The company became Centel in 1960, and in 1964, we were the first office in the country to have a completely cordless system. We were still handling long distance for AT&T, at the same time helping our customers with local problems. Sometime in the 1980s, the 911 system was developed, so we had fewer emergency calls to handle.

Information soon became directory assistance.

There was always some customer -- from out of town, I'm sure -- trying to get the telephone number for a cat house. We had one little, older operator who always gave them the number for the animal shelter.

In 1984, we stopped handling long distance calls for AT&T. By this time, we had computerized switchboards for directory assistance and local assistance.

In about 1990, Sprint bought out Centel. Because of all the new services that customers could now do on their own, service demands for the telephone operator diminished. On Jan. 14, the operator services department at Las Vegas Boulevard and Carson Avenue became history after almost a century.

I loved helping our customers, but as the system became more and more automated, we soon lost that personal contact with them. Thinking back to 1953, those 20-minute waits weren't all that bad!

VANDA EVERSOL

LAS VEGAS