Telephone service came early to Ontario
By Sean Hart
Argus Observer
Sunday, September 14, 2008 12:24 AM PDT
ONTARIO—A series of beeps — some short, some long — famously set out across a wire from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore May 24, 1844, carrying with it a message — “What hath God wrought” — and the beginning of a new era in communication.
Samuel F. B. Morse created the electrical telegraph that sent the message that was transmitted in the code named after him, where each letter of the alphabet was assigned a unique identifier using short and long beeps.
Based on that series of beeps, the United States’ telephone system has grown even beyond the wires that were instrumental when the telegraph was introduced, and now cellular phone towers dot the country, granting access to the mobile communication network even in many rural areas.
When telephones first came to the Treasure Valley, though, they were not like cellular phones of today or even modern landlines.
As far as having a telephone, it hung on the wall. A person served as the operator.
Longtime Ontario resident and local historian Hugh Lackey said operators still connected each call in 1946 when he returned from World War II and got his first phone.
“She was the one that connected you to the line you wanted. You said a number, and she would plug it in,” he said.
Prior to having his own phone, Lackey said his family shared phone services in Ontario when he was a youngster.
“In (1928) or ’29, we moved next door to my grandma who had a phone,” Lackey said.
He added that was the phone number his family could be reached at.
“It wasn’t any great problem other than she would have to come out on the porch and shout at whoever she needed to come over,” he said.
Lackey recalled the phone bill was around $4 per month in those days, the same as the monthly cost for city water but a lot of money at the time.
Phones were only available in cities at first, Lackey said, primarily because of the financial difficulties of running electrical and phone lines to residences in the country, until the federal government stepped in to create a greater rural infrastructure with the implementation of the Rural Electrification Administration.
The REA was established in 1935, according to information from the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, and was administrated by Morris L. Cooke from 1935 to 1937.
“(The REA) had to put telephone poles out there (in the country) with a line on it,” Lackey said. “Prior to that, the electricity would be for the town. They would have generators for the town.”
Lackey said Ontario’s electrical generator, along with a water tower, sat near where the underpass for the railroad tracks on Idaho Avenue is today.
Lackey’s wife, Lorraine Lackey, lived with her family near Malheur Butte when the first electrical and phone lines were constructed there and remembers the privacy the first phone lines provided.
“There’d be several people on one line,” she said and added neighbors could hear any conversation just by picking up the receiver in their home.
“You would hear the phone ring for your neighbor’s number,” Hugh Lackey continued. He explained the different numbers on the same line would have different patterns of short and long rings to distinguish the call’s intended recipient, similar to the Morse code that inspired the system.
“When you picked up the phone and heard people talking that meant the line was busy,” he said.
TELEPHONE TIMELINE
When the phone systems were first constructed, the various lines in various places were not all connected, so calls could only be made within a local network until lines were created to connect the independent networks.
According to information from the Malheur Bell telephone company, Ontario’s current phone service provider, the Malheur Telephone Company established the first telephone service in the county in Vale in 1895, but it only provided service locally until Rocky Mountain Bell created a toll line from Boise to Weiser in 1898.
In 1900, the Malheur Bell Web site states, Rocky Mountain Bell began operating an exchange in Ontario, serving 10 initial customers, and an exchange in Nyssa in 1903.
A competing company, the Independent Long Distance Telephone Company of Idaho, also constructed a line between Weiser and Boise in 1907 that went through both Ontario and Nyssa, according to the Web site, and local companies were created in both towns by 1910 that competed with the original Rocky Mountain Bell companies. The competition lasted around two years, the Web site states, until the Malheur Home Telephone Company, which was incorporated in 1910, purchased the Malheur Telephone Company in Vale.
the Ontario and Nyssa Rocky Mountain Bell companies and the Independent Long Distance Telephone Company’s Ontario and Nyssa locations by 1912. Malheur Home Telephone Company gave shares of its own stock to purchase the local Rocky Mountain Bell companies, which left Rocky Mountain Bell holding
a “controlling interest” of the Malheur Home Telephone Company, according to Malheur Bell’s Web site, and when Rocky Mountain Bell merged with other
companies to create the Mountain States Telephone and Telegraph Company, this new company acquired primary ownership of Malheur Home Telephone
Company.
Through the years, according to the Web site, Mountain States Telephone and Telegraph Company, which was commonly called Mountain Bell, purchased
Malheur Home Telephone Company’s remaining stock, and the company operated under the Mountain Bell name elsewhere and came to be called Malheur Bell in Malheur County, the name by which it is still known today.
