Bell Exhibit Spans History of the Phone

At the beginning of this century, the telephone number at the Clark County clerk’s office was 67. Not 744-6700 or 745-0067, just 67.

One household’s number was 1. No telephone number was more than three digits, and the Winchester directory was nearly pocket-size, resembling an address book typed on index cards.

The East Tennessee Telephone Co. book for Winchester is one of hundreds of items on display at the Telephone Pioneers Museum in the South Central Bell building on Forest Avenue here.

John Satterwhite, who retired from South Central Bell last year, said the first telephone pole he installed is in the museum. His first set of pole-climbing hooks is there, as are telephones dating from 1877, a phone booth and a bull’s-eye switchboard like the ones shown in old television shows.

Items for the museum, which opened last fall, were collected during the last year.

‘Pack Rats’ Contributed

“Several of us pack rats had gotten stuff and stored it away, hoping someday there would be a museum,” Satterwhite said. Items have been loaned, donated and purchased.

The telephone book was found with an antique phone in a farmhouse near Boonesboro. Inside the directory is a motto: “The mail is quick, the telegraph is quicker, but the telephone is instantaneous.”

Satterwhite and Gordon Blackman, who retired four years ago, remember using many of the items displayed and agree that it seems strange for them to be shown as relics now.

Tools, testers, pictures and telephones line the walls of the one-room museum, and Satterwhite said he wonders where the museum will go when it outgrows this space.

Bell Co. Artifacts

A South Central Bell water jug, flashlight, mirror and hatchet are displayed. Telephones with small monitors attached to them are shown (the video-type phones were introduced around 1950).

A telephone booth from Louisville, circa 1915, stands in one corner. Portable telephones in leather cases, used by the Army in World War II, and a telephone that extends from the wall on a collapsible metal arm are also displayed.

Telephone Pioneers has opened similar museums in Louisville and Owensboro.

“We’re trying to tell the story of South Central Bell,” Satterwhite said, “not just the telephone.”