Bryant Pond is one of those tiny Maine towns that come upon the traveler as suddenly as a streak of summer lightning. There you are, tooling north on Route 26, dazzled by an occasional stand of white birch, sniffing the pinelike incense, just about convinced that this is God's country the way the glaciers carved it out 12,000 years ago. Then the road descends and a white Baptist church materializes on the left, as if designed for Our Town. At the bottom of the
hill, as the wayfarer battles a curve and then a second, sharper right turn, two other obligatory props of a New England town blur past: the village store and the post office. Bryant Pond would be a dot on the map, located by reference to nearby towns with such names as Norway, Paris and Mexico, if it were not for one curious fact: this little way station happens to be the home of the last crank-telephone system in the U.S. Here is how it works. Somewhere in the modest stillness of Bryant Pond, someone rotates a crank, jangling the bell on the call box and generating enough current to cause a tab with the caller's number to click down on the switchboard in the pine-paneled back room of Elden Hathaway's house, also known as the Bryant Pond Telephone Co. One of the two operators, comfortably seated a few feet from an abandoned exercise cycle and at right angles to a gun rack, responds to the caller, voice to voice, and makes the requested connection by hand. If nobody picks up the phone, she will report "d.a." (doesn't answer). None of the nervously informing burps and buzzes of a dial system are available to the user of the crank phone. It is an eminently human
arrangement. Although nearly half of the 434 customers now have private phones, the party line is still a distinctive part of the crank system. As many as 23 customers have been known to share a single line. Courtesy requires that a party-liner give a little ring when signing off to notify the others that the line is clear. One sociable lady has made a habit of giving a little ding when she comes on, extending an invitation to her neighbors to tune in for lively listening. Eighty years ago, when the first switchboard occupied the back of Dudley's Store, impromptu musicales were broadcast along party lines, featuring a harmonica player named Davis.
Communal use of the phone tends to be less exuberant today. But the switchboard still serves as a referral center and hotline. If a caller wants the town carpenter, Elwood Wing, and Wing is away from home, the chances are fair that an operator will know where. When a fire is reported, operators ring up the members of the volunteer fire department. If a small child comes home from school to an empty house, the switchboard routinely plays babysitter, relaying Mother's messages.