Zenia Reaches Out; Rural Community Gets Direct Dialing

Call it progress in Zenia. And now, you can call it yourself.

The remote community in the southwest corner of Trinity County has taken a leap into the modern world with the advent of what residents call “real phones.”

But what makes a phone real to a Zenia resident is something most others take for granted--direct dialing.

Until this summer, callers to Zenia had to contact the Zenia toll station where an operator would route the call manually.

“The only other toll stations I knew of were in Death Valley, and they had gotten rid of those,” said Zenia resident Wendy Watkins-Stewart, who helped spearhead the drive for the change.

In the modern world of direct dialing, the toll station was an odyssey through long-distance operators and history.

A caller would ask a long-distance operator to be connected with the Zenia toll station, and--depending on the operator--would be connected with Zenia in just a few minutes or a few hours.

“You’d call the operator, who would freak and run and call her supervisor, unless it was an operator who had made a toll station call before,” Watkins-Stewart said.

Frontier Life Style

“If you’ve got an operator who knew what she was doing, it wouldn’t take longer than, say, a person-to-person call,” Watkins-Stewart said.

Trinity County is well known for its frontier life style, including having no stoplights and a community that only narrowly approved an attempt to bring electricity to its residents. But Zenia is remote even by Trinity County standards, about a 4 1/2-hour drive from Redding.

Getting a direct-dialing system wasn’t easy. It took nearly five years of community residents’ petitions, calls and letters to the state Public Utilities Commission, hoping for pressure to be placed on Continental Telephone Co. of California, or Contel, Watkins-Stewart said.

The upgraded system was put into operation in June, said LuAnn Weldon, Contel customer services supervisor in Garberville. Zenia residents were also able to add such luxuries as “call waiting” and “call forwarding” with the completion of the system upgrading in late September.

Rita Hazel, AT&T; communication manager in Sacramento, said toll stations are not uncommon in rural areas but serve such small communities that most people have never heard of them. There is a toll station serving the Salmon River area in Siskiyou County.

Upgrading the Zenia phone system also meant sacking the elaborate party-line system, which often forced callers to wait hours until the line was free, Watkins-Stewart said.

And privacy wasn’t a guarantee.

When the Island Mountain railroad tunnel was being replaced, the mining company installed a phone on the Watkins-Stewart party line.

“We had some 75 or 85 miners making calls (on the party line). We heard some fascinating things,” she said. “Of course, it (the wait) was real infuriating as well.”