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Could anything be more of a family operation? And like every family, the Bryant Pond Telephone Co. had given everybody the illusion that it would live more or less happily ever after. Then Elden Hathaway turned 65, thought some, and quietly sold for $50,000 the stock in the business he had bought for $2,500 in 1951. Elden: who had strung Army field wire at $14 a mile to add to the 100 or so subscribers he began with. Elden: who had tinkered with one secondhand switchboard after another—Western Electric, Stromberg-Carlson, Northern Electric. Elden: who had pulled himself out of bed to man the phones more midnights than he cares to remember, wakened by a night-alarm gong from the switchboard and a kick or two from his wife Barbara, who with her daughter Susan may have logged more hours than any two operators in crank-phone history.
In one day this homey and tenuous network tore apart, and the town with it, when the new owner, the Oxford County Telephone & Telegraph Co., announced it was replacing crank with dial. Before you could say d.a., a "Don't Yank the Crank" committee was formed. T shirts displaying that motto went on sale in Brad Hooper's village store. There were town meetings and more town meetings. Lawyers were hired, and briefs got filed with the public utilities commission to prevent the conversion to dial, and even void the sale.
The townspeople were startled at their own deep feelings. A telephone, they painfully discovered, is more than a telephone. It sets the whole style according to which a community speaks to itself and the world.
The fuss took Elden Hathaway by surprise. Shock is more like it. A cheerful bear of a man with a beard, a bristling brush cut and a voice that booms as if he were fighting a bad connection, Hathaway exudes the durability associated with oak trees, granite boulders and other sturdy natural acts of Maine. But he is also a stoic after the New England manner, accustomed to the coming and, mostly, the going of all things human. Piece by piece, the Bryant Pond he was born into, two houses down from where he lives today, has vanished.
When Elden was a boy, Bryant Pond boasted a dozen stores: a butcher's shop, a grain store, a milliner, a harness shop with cobbler's trade on the side. There was Chase's Variety. There was Cole's Hardware ("Quick sales and small profits," the proprietors used to say). An opera house, burned in 1928, was the pride of the town. An ice cream parlor and pool hall did business in the basement. Silent films with piano accompaniment were regularly featured. Young Elden popped the corn and hawked his products to customers at a nickel a box.
Hathaway has watched this Bryant Pond disappear along with Long's Lumber Yard, where they planed on all four sides, true and square, and a cannery where a boy could pick up a damaged tin of creamed corn for a free lunch on his way to a day of fishing. After so much loss, why should a crank-telephone switchboard in the back room of his home lay claim to immortality?