Powell Liberty Historical Society

Dial telephones and free local calling revolutionized personal communications that century. For a fixed monthly fee — around four dollars a month mid-century — you could instantly com-municate and interact with a neighbor, a merchant, or a friend in your community. All you had to do was pick up the phone and dial a few digits. In seconds you were speaking with the person you wanted to speak with, or with someone who could go and find them and bring them to the telephone. You could talk as long as you wanted and dial as many local calls as you wanted for that fixed monthly fee.

But that anomaly dividing Liberty Township was an impediment to this novel and virtually friction-free method of communications. A neighbor, a friend, or a merchant on the other side of that artificial boundary could not be reached by dialing. And they could not be reached for free. The telephone companies had drawn a line, and you were either on one side of it or the other.

To call across that boundary, you had to dial zero and wait for an operator to answer. She — telephone operators were exclusively women until the 1972 Equal Employment Opportunity Act changed the practice — she saw a light flashing at a jack on her switchboard, picked up a cord, plugged in, pulled the talk switch, and answered your call with one word, “Operator.” That single word both announced who you had reached, and inquired as to how she could complete your call. You responded without preamble, simply stating the name of the town you wanted to reach and the number. “Delaware,” you said: “2-3456.” Efficiency, courtesy, and speed were the goals of this transaction.

She wrote the town and number down on a paper ticket, repeated it back to you, and asked you for your number so she could charge you for the call. Your number was right there on the center of the telephone dial. You said it, she wrote it down and concluded the exchange with a “thank you” and began the task of connecting your call.

With the other end of the cord, the operator started tapping the edge of each jack on a row of jacks that were labeled “Delaware.” If she heard a click in her headset, she tapped the next one and continued until she found one that did not click. No click meant that the trunk was not occupied and she pushed the jack all the way in. Then she pushed a rocker switch on her shelf to signal for an operator in Delaware. You heard nothing, not even the clicks, just indistinct back-ground chatter — the voices of other operators working their calls. And then the distant opera-tor answered “Delaware.” and you knew she had gotten to the right town. You said nothing. Your operator said “Columbus calling,” and gave the second operator the number you gave her. The second operator repeated the number and said, “one moment.” You heard dial-tone for an instant before it cut out as she dialed the number you could not dial yourself.

You heard this interaction between the operators and knew to keep quiet while it occurred. Finally, you heard the distant telephone ringing. The operators were still on the line with you. You and the two operators were all waiting for the call to be answered. When you heard the person you were calling say “Hello?” it was finally your turn to speak. As you replied to the hello the distant operator rocked your cord’s talk switch and silently dropped off the call. But the local operator, the one you had spoken with, she had one more task to do. She put the ticket she had been writing in a punch-clock to stamp the start time of the call on it and then she rocked your talk switch to drop off your line as she picked up another cord to handle the next blinking light.

When you were finished talking and hung up, a lamp started blinking for your cords at both switchboards, and as each operator noticed them, they pulled out the cords that had connected your call. One last task: the operator you spoke with stamped the ticket with the end time and set it aside for billing. The charge? Twenty cents for each three minutes of talk. It would appear on your next telephone bill.

Twenty cents was not an insignificant amount in the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s. This meant that while you were talking, you had to worry about hanging up before the three minutes were up or your call was going to be a 40-cent call. The operator was not going to interrupt you. The equipment in those days was not capable of beeping or buzzing when three minutes were up. This meant that toll calls were never leisurely calls. You were keeping an eye on a clock or watch as you carried on the conversation. Some people used the kitchen timer. When it dinged, you, in mid-sentence, immediately said “goodbye!” and hung up.

But wait, that 20 or 40 or 60 cent call was subject to a 10% federal tax on long distance calls (down from 25% during World War II) so it was really a 22 cent charge for each three minutes of talk. (That tax, imposed by Congress on long distance charges in 1898 to fund the Spanish-American War, was never rescinded. It lasted until 2006.)

Compare that 22 cent charge with these typical 1958 prices: a loaf of bread was 19 cents; a gal-lon of gas, 24 cents; a postage stamp, four cents; and a 15½-oz can of Chef Boy-Ar-Dee spaghetti was 19 cents. A one-pound box of Nabisco saltines was 25 cents, and a 17-oz can of Libby’s peaches, 25 cents.

You could have a leisurely, care-free call with a neighbor or friend on your side of the township’s telephone company territory boundary, but not when calling a neighbor or friend on the other side. Unless you were rich, those toll calls had to be quick verbal transactions.

How did this artificial boundary come about and how did it come to divide the township? The short answer is that that boundary was a telephone company territory line and it was placed along that road based on which telephone company had gotten their lines there first, and which telephone company was the better-financed and more persistent negotiator with the Public Utilities Commission when territory lines were officially finalized and mapped in the 1930s and ’40s.

Landline telephone service in the United States is provided by private for-profit companies that were granted territorial monopolies by the federal government and state regulators. To the south of the telephone territory boundary were the wires of The Ohio Bell Telephone Company, a wholly-owned AT&T subsidiary. To the north, the wires of the Northern Ohio Telephone Company, a small independent telephone company headquartered in Bellevue, Ohio.

Nationwide mid-20th century, there were some 2000 for-profit telephone companies and an-other 4000 or so rural telephone cooperatives providing telephone service within their territories. 22 of them were owned by AT&T and those 22 —the “Bell System” — had 83% of the nation’s telephone subscribers. The other 17% were served by what were known as independent telephone companies.

Liberty Township found itself straddling two telephone company territories, the Bell System to the south, and an “independent” to the north. The reason you could call across that territory boundary at all was the result of government regulatory and commercial pressure. The companies were making good money in their territories. Revenue from edge communities such as Powell and Hyatts in Liberty Township — and nearby Ostrander, Plain City, Lewis Center and Galena — was a drop in the bucket to Ma Bell. Figuring out how to smooth the burrs suffered by edge communities like ours was not worth their time and effort.

Residential telephone service in the 20th century was remarkably cheap because it was subsidized by much more expensive business telephone service (the same wire was more expensive when used by a business, and businesses paid for each call they made). AT&T also made significant money on long distance service and split it with the independents when the call originated or terminated on their equipment. And all phone companies hauled in advertising revenue from the ubiquitous yellow pages, typically the biggest section of each local telephone directory.

This orderly, regulated, and uncompetitive state of affairs meant that residential telephone service was cheap in the 20th century, and it all fell apart early in the 21st with the advent of cell-phones and the internet. But in the 20th century, for a flat rate you got a residential line and one telephone — you could rent more phones for a little bit more— and you could place unlimited local calls and talk as long as you wanted without paying a penny extra.

One burr that bedeviled Liberty Township was the boundary that defined “local calls.” Another was the technical limitation of dialing across incompatible dialing equipment. AT&T’s Bell Labs invented radar, microwave transmission and the transistor, but AT&T was in no hurry to give its competition a hand by improving interconnections.

The telephone territory boundary that split Liberty Township, the solid black line on the map above, crosses the Scioto River at the western edge of the township and runs east first along Seldom Seen Road, then north on Liberty Road to Rutherford Road, then east through woods and fields — bisecting today’s Carriage Road subdivision — all the way to the Olentangy River. The boundary then follows the river south to Powell Road and then east again along Powell Road until it enters Orange Township. Orange Township is also divided by the boundary, and when the boundary line reaches Westerville, it loops north to keep all of Westerville in Ohio Bell territory.

So if you lived in the little railroad town of Powell, Ohio Bell’s telephone poles passed by your house. If you lived in Hyatts, one train station north, Northern Ohio’s telephone poles passed by your house. You couldn’t pick your telephone company like you can today for cellphone service—the telephone company picked you. If you wanted telephone service at your home or place of business, the wire normally came from the nearest pole.

Now back to that $4/mo rate for telephone service that entitled you to unlimited talk in the local calling area. Liberty Township’s problem: it was in two different local calling areas. Telephones south of Seldom Seen Road were in Ohio Bell’s Columbus local calling area while telephones north of Seldom Seen Road were in Northern Ohio’s Delaware local calling area. The Columbus calling area was huge. It included the city and many of its suburbs—Westerville, Canal Winchester, Grove City and many more. The Delaware local calling area not so much. Surprisingly, the Delaware local calling area did not include the whole of Delaware County. While it included Lewis Center and Radnor, it omitted Sunbury and Galena. You got more bang for your $4 if you were with Ohio Bell.

But the real problem was that the two calling areas did not overlap. There was no free calling between the two different phone companies. You had to pay the three minute rate to call between the two halves of the township — 20 cents for every 3 minutes you were connected, plus the 10% tax. And until the mid 1960s you could not dial across that boundary yourself. You had to wait for an operator to place the call for you.

As Columbus grew and its suburbs pushed further and further out, that calling area boundary running from Plain City to Westerville became an impediment to new development. After all, you could not live where you could not call home from work to say you would be late for supper. Northern Ohio and Ohio Bell, prodded by the Public Utilities Commission which was being prodded by the housing industry, came up with a solution: Northern Ohio would build a new exchange near the little hamlet of Rathbone and rewire the central parts of Liberty and most of Concord Township to it. Their engineers would figure out how to connect the Rathbone exchange to both the Columbus local calling area and the Delaware local calling area, a novel idea back then. When they inaugurated service, Rathbone telephones could dial across the telephone company territory boundary for free, and Columbus calling area telephones could call Rathbone telephones for free.

That new Rathbone exchange, inaugurated in 1961 with its feet in both calling areas (and Northern Ohio’s neighboring Cheshire exchange in the Lewis Center area of Orange Township, reconfigured like Rathbone along with the Plain City exchange) made possible the development of the housing subdivisions that define Powell, Jerome, and Lewis Center today.

It needs noting that until 1988, Rathbone subscribers had to dial 7 and wait for another dial tone before dialing a Columbus local number, but the call was free. (Powell phones did not dial a 7 first to reach Rathbone, they just needed to dial the seven digits.) It looks like Northern Ohio went the cheap route with the dialing equipment they used to reach Ohio Bell’s lines, and one narrative (see the Carriage Road Story below) indicated that calling Columbus — and therefore Ohio Bell subscribers in Powell — was not reliable due to busy signals well into the 1990s.

The Rathbone Exchange moved the toll boundary that separated the township from Seldom Seen Road 3½ miles north to Hyatts Road (see map in illustration 5). The township was still separated communications-wise, but the more populated southern half of the township was finally seamlessly connected.

They say that many a lifetime friendship begins at school. Today teenagers are constantly texting and DM’ing each other, with just the occasional voice call. Back in the last century your only choice was the telephone, or you waited for the next school day to say hello. A common refrain from your parents: “please get off the phone right now, I’m expecting an important call!”—no call waiting tones back then; if you were on the line, everyone else got a busy signal.

And then the phone bill arrived. At 22 cents for each 3 minutes of talk, long distance charges could easily double or triple the $4 base rate with teenagers in the house. “You can’t spend so much time on the phone with Sally, the charges for last month’s long distance are through the roof!” The first reprimand applied to all of the teenager’s friends, but the second one discriminated. How many budding friendships at Powell High School and later at Olentangy High School cooled because of communications restrictions?

Commerce discrimination had the same financial and dialing difficulty components, and it had a third. Ohio Bell customers got a Columbus phonebook every year while Northern Ohio customers got the Delaware phone book. Need a plumber? There was a list of them in the yellow pages, and some had big ads there to catch your eye. Toothache? Call around until you found a dentist who could see you immediately — the yellow pages listed dentists too. And auto parts dealers, and hardware stores. Every trade and profession was in the yellow pages. Whoever was in your phone book got your call. Whoever wasn’t, didn’t.

The lists and ads in the yellow pages of the two directories were different. Callers from the northern part of the township ended up spending their money in Delaware. Callers from the southern part spent their money in Dublin, Worthington or Westerville. (Savvy Rathbone subscribers asked to receive both directories in order to have more options.)

This community division was not unique to Liberty Township. It occurred in local calling area edge communities all over Ohio and across the nation, and telephone subscribers continually made their displeasure known. Switching equipment improved in the 1960s allowing “short distance” toll calls like the ones across Liberty Township’s territory boundary to be dialed directly and timed and billed automatically. That smoothed the first impediment edge communities suffered, but you still paid 20+ cents if you called across that line.

Specific to our township, the 1960s Rathbone exchange discussed earlier solved the dialing and toll problem for the lower two thirds of the township, enabling the development of the township from a rural to a suburban one. Then in 1987 an Extended Local Calling Plan became available from Ohio Bell — with GTE, Northern Ohio’s successor, making one available by 1992. In this latter year the artificial communications boundary that bedeviled the township completely disappeared, because for a few dollars more per month, these plans granted free calling across the boundary. With these plans, Delaware subscribers could now call into Columbus, and therefore to Powell for free, and Powell subscribers could call Delaware for free.

Two of Liberty Township’s three communications impediments present since the advent of the telephone had finally been breached completely. The third, the different telephone directories from the two phone companies, lingered into the first few years of the 21st century, and then Google Search and Google Maps killed off the need for telephone directories world-wide.

The artificial communications boundary imposed on Liberty Township in the 20th century introduced friction to friendships and biased commerce. Older residents who lived on either side of Seldom Seen Road remember it, even if they never had a name for it. That artifact of telephone landline monopolies is now history. The phone in your pocket today freely and effortlessly lets you follow your friends and expand your commerce across any and all boundaries nationwide — at no additional charge.

Stay tuned for the Carriage Road story after the tables!

Liberty Township, Delaware County, Ohio
Landline Telephone Company Branding