Ma Bell’S Boys

By Charles Colvard

It is 1960 when Chris goes to work for Western Electric Company in the Bay Area of Northern California. Happy to be employed by a prosperous company, Chriss hard work pays off several years later when he is offered a coveted position in teletype repair. Chris jumps at the chance that comes with only one drawback: he must work next to Manny Mokey, a disheveled, eccentric employee.

As Chris acclimates to his new position, he observes Manny, listens to his tall tales, and soon realizes Manny will do anything to spur the envy of those around him. As Manny shares his dream of one day becoming a financial tycoon, Chris fuels his delusions of grandeur by selling him silver coins. But as the threat of a Bell System breakup looms, Chris turns from con artist to full-fledged thief after he pockets one of Mannys treasured coins. It is only after Chris is transferred to Pacific Bell that he meets a crook bigger than himself and must do whatever it takes to stop him before Chris himself is implicated. Now, all he has to do is prove that it takes a thief to catch a thief.

Ma Bells Boys shares a glimpse inside the walls of a telephone business as a young employee attempts to work his way up the ladder of success while battling greed, deception, and his own temptations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: May 6, 2014
• ISBN: 9781480807297

Charles Colvard

Charles Colvard retired from Pacific Bell after thirty years of service that included time working for Western Electric, the manufacturing and supply arm of the Bell system. He now resides in Eagle, Idaho, with his dachshund, Buddy.

Book preview

ONE

THE DANGEROUS TIME OF LIFE COMES AFTER success. I worked thirty years for the Bell System, looked forward to a life of leisure, especially in the mornings as I crawled out of bed, and when I finally got my wish I missed the job I had dreamed of leaving behind me. When I was working I had a sense of importance, especially to my wife and son. Challenges of the job gave me a certain sense of satisfaction as I coped with them. But after retirement I began to grope with anxiety, sensing that my really useful life was over. Then it seemed that all I was doing was waiting to die.

Then I got to thinking more about the company where I had spent so many years. The French are given credit for saying that nothing is permanent but change; but if nothing is permanent but change, still, nothing is missed more than the past, even if that past has been replaced by better times. This is probably so because the past represents, if nothing else, those days when, as the song says, I wore a younger man’s clothes. And so, I decided to journey back to those particular years when I worked for Ma Bell, back to my memories, back to live life over again in my mind, and consequently to put some of it down on paper.

I went to work for the Bell System in 1960. In those days before the breakup of the System, it was a company so vast, so pervasive, that directly or indirectly it controlled every telephone conversation. It was a company so rich that no individual owned more than one percent of its stock. It was a company so on the cutting edge of technology that it invented the transistor. It was so independent that it designed, manufactured and repaired every piece of plant (imbedded facilities) that it deployed. Captains of industry, men who were chairmen of boards of directors in other companies, considered it an honor to be selected to serve as mere directors on the board of this company. In 1960, when I started working for the System, there was no talk about the System being a monopoly that needed to be dismantled, at least no talk that I remember; but when talk like that did arise, this was a company that had the power to determine when, and how, such a breakup would take place, a company virtually in control of its own destiny. Indeed, it was in control of the destiny of all elements of the industry.

The Bell System was really many companies under one umbrella. It consisted of a holding company at the top of the pyramid called American Telephone and Telegraph Company. This colossus maintained controlling interests in all the major telephone companies throughout the land. It owned one hundred percent of Bell Laboratories where all its plant was designed. It owned outright all the long distance network, called Long Lines. One fully owned subsidiary, Yellow Pages, provided phone books. Western Electric Company in the United States and Northern Electric Company in Canada were owned outright by the System; these two companies provided manufacturing, supply and repair facilities for the System, with installations in many major cities.

I went to work for Western Electric Company in one of the supply and repair locations. It was situated in the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California. The building was two-story, white and clean; the building was constructed in the mid-fifties as a replacement for a smaller facility in Emeryville. It was probably a thousand feet deep and nearly as wide, with ample lawns setting off most of it. Western Electric occupied three-quarters of the building, while Pacific Telephone and Telegraph used the rest. Plant moved back and forth between Western and Pacific Telephone. Western Electric provided Pacific Telephone with new and repaired plant. Pacific Telephone brought in plant to Western Electric, either to be junked or repaired. We were business relatives, two separate companies sharing the real estate, making money for each other, passing compound profits on up the line to American Telephone and Telegraph Company.

Below management, the work force at Western was divided into non-union office workers and union employees in the shop and warehouse. It was a big secret what the office people earned, but in the shop and warehouse the wages were often discussed. The union personnel worked with five grades of pay, with increments in each grade. Everyone started out in Grade One, hoping to rise to Grade Five before they retired. In the shop the chances of reaching Grade Five were a lot better than they were in the warehouse, simply because there were a lot more jobs in the shop that were Grade Five jobs. Still, saying that there were more jobs in the shop that were Grade Five jobs doesn’t mean that there were all that many. So many people had quit in the late fifties to go to work for the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, and so many younger people about my age had been hired to replace them, the best a new shop employee who was realistic might hope for was Grade Four, and that probably not sooner than with twenty years of service.

I was hired to work in the shop. I started out earning a dollar and eighty-three cents per hour, poor pay even by the standards of 1960. I know it was poor pay because I quit a job making a dollar an hour more to come to Western Electric. But unlike the job I quit, it was day work rather than graveyard. And the work was easier, maybe because I could now stay awake. And I heard things like you’ll always have a job here. Even in the Depression we didn’t lay anyone off. The married guys worked three days a week, and the single guys worked two. And you’ll have a pension when you retire. In those days, we were still basking in the glow of the fifties, so there was no apparent reason to think that things would ever change.

After a year or so in Grade One packing various items, I was promoted to Grade Two and went to paint equipment down in the spray booth. I worked there for about three years before I went up to Grade Three. For practical purposes, Grade Three was the end of the line. People would have to retire or die for me to go further, and as I intimated before, a substantial amount of people. But still, I was finally in what I considered the upper class, if not the aristocracy. And I reasoned that once I was at the top of Grade Three I might almost be making a marginal living.

In Grade Three I started out wiring relay racks. Soon after I arrived in the section, I discovered the curious reason that the job opened up for me when it did. It seemed that two guys working in the section had been sniping at each other a good portion of the day, when one guy said something about the other guy’s wife. After the derogatory remark took place, the injured party came after the perpetrator with fists flying. One suck-ass ran and found the boss and the boss fired the two of them on the spot, sending them out of the building. The boss was criticized later for not sending them upstairs to the medical people before chasing them away, but the one who took the most criticism was the blabbermouth.

Now the job wiring relay racks was the most boring job that I had ever had, even if it was better paid. The boss told me a story one day, prefacing it with the statement that sooner or later every job gets boring. He said that when he was working on the bench like I was doing, he solved the problem of boredom by having a contest with a fellow worker. The idea was to see who could produce the most. He said that the competition really made the day fly by. I had always preferred idle conversation, or reading a book in the restroom as a way to lessen the monotony, but I thought it would not be prudent to disclose my preferences. He probably knew already how I felt; the story was probably a hint for me to get moving a little faster. At any rate, after I was with him for about four years, he gave me a merit raise. He told me that they only gave him permission to give out two that year, each one ten cents an hour. Not long after I got my merit raise, the union bargained them away, using the argument that they were not given out fairly. My feeling about the union was and still is that they always want to reduce every outstanding employee down to the level of the mediocre employee. And yet, applying the union’s argument to myself, I have to say that they were not altogether wrong.

After about six years wiring relay racks, having been with the company around ten years by then, I got my first real break. The boss came around one day and asked me if I would like to transfer over to teletype repair. I felt that teletype repair was the cream of the crop for Grade Three jobs, so I jumped at the chance. It was only a lateral move, no upgrade, but it seemed to me that it would be far better than where I was. It was the only job that required formal training before being put to work in the section. So I went to six weeks of full-time schooling out in the teletype classroom, along with another fellow, and then I was sent over to work for Danny Castro. At one time Danny Castro’s section had been one of several repair sections, but now teletype was cut down to one repair section, and one testing section across from us. There were twelve repairmen in my section, and ten testers across the way. Years ago, when there was piece work, if a repairman wanted his job to sail through teletype without the tester finding reason to return it to him for additional work, the repairman was expected to put a candy bar, or something equivalent, with the job when it went to the testing section. But by my time we all received straight pay, no extra money for exceeding the standards, so bribery was a thing of the past.

When I showed up that first day at teletype, Danny never bothered to introduce my schoolmate and I around to the other guys. Maybe he figured we already knew them all, since we had both been around some time. He showed us jobs he wanted us to do, told us that if we needed anything to let him know, and showed us our benches. My bench was by the windows at the front of the building, the second bench in a row of twelve. It was a great location because I could look out at the main street, and I could open the window next to me for fresh air. It did have one drawback though, so it seemed to me in the beginning: it was behind the bench of Manfred Mulligan Mokey, Senior.

TWO

I WAS SOMEWHAT THANKFUL THAT DANNY Castro hadn’t bothered to introduce me around to the other guys in the section because that introduction would have meant breaking the ice with Mokey. The reason I felt that way was because Mokey was far from nondescript. Yes, Mokey was special. A guy I worked with back in the relay rack section told me a story about Mokey, back when I was working there. The guy said that he had gone to a company dance once and Mokey had been there, too. The narrator told me that Mokey had sat alone, elbow on the table, forearm up, apparently displaying his customized wrist watch, a watch that had been enhanced from a hundred dollar watch to a five thousand dollar watch by the addition of jewels around the face of it. His theory was that Mokey must have hoped that some woman would observe that watch and go ape over it, and consequently be so impressed with Mokey that she would ask Mokey to dance with her.

But it was far more than the watch story. What prompted the watch story in the first place was the fact that I commented on Mokey’s general appearance as he walked by one day. Mokey always wore jeans, a Western shirt that usually had the pockets ripped out halfway because he had them stuffed beyond capacity, and a pair of scuffed-up cowboy boots. In those days Western attire was not fashionable, at least in our building. I suppose his clothes would have been fine out on the range where the deer and the antelope play. The fact that half his teeth were missing, that his hair was usually a mess, and he often needed a shave might not have mattered out in the open country, either. Or he might have worked out well in Hollywood in a Western movie, playing the part of the villain.

Now that I was in teletype working next to Mokey, he would pass by my bench, going to talk to other guys, or going to the teletype storeroom in the back corner, just looking at me as he passed by, a look that reminded me of the look on the face of one of those wooden drugstore Indians of days gone by. I’d glance at him furtively, glad to see that he wasn’t stopping to chat, partly because I was weary as to how the conversation might go, and partly because I was the new guy who didn’t want to get a bad reputation as one who talked over the bench all the time, knowing well enough that such activity did not rest well with management.

Soon the guy that worked behind me became a substitute listener. Mokey would go talk to him, but mostly look at me as he talked. The guy behind me was John Jones, a weightlifter that didn’t shoot the bull too much; mostly, he kept his head buried in the teletype machine he was working on. But I suppose that John’s concentration on the unit on his bench served Mokey well enough, since as I say, I suspected Mokey wasn’t talking to John as much as he was talking to me. John was about my age, early thirties, probably a good five years or so younger than Mokey. John was short and very muscular, while Mokey and I were tall and slender, with Mokey coming in about two inches under my six feet. The three of us had brown hair, though mine was lighter than Mokey’s, and much fuller than John’s hair, as he was going bald on top.

John had been divorced not long before, and Mokey was commiserating with John one day, but really what he was doing was talking about his own troubled past. It went something like this: Oh, she put on a good show before I married her. The minister at the Martin Lutheran Church said she was a fine catch. Her mother liked me because I had a job- all of them was on welfare. But then, after we was married for a while, she’d steal the car keys while I was sleepin’ and she’d run around with her friends. And she didn’t even have no driver’s license. And we’d always have to move ‘cause she never could get along with the landlord. And I’d have to go down to the police station and bail her out. And the sergeant’d say to her, ‘How come you can’t be like your husband here and stay out of trouble?’

Mokey said that one time a landlord told her the washing machine wasn’t functioning properly, but still she used it and ruined her blouse. Then she wanted the landlord to give her money for a new blouse. Mokey’s wife had a bad back, and as a consequence slept on a board, a wide piece of plywood that she kept out in the hallway during the day. The landlord had asked her several times to keep the board in the apartment, but she had ignored his request. After the row over the blouse, the landlord was so mad that he took her board and wouldn’t give it back until they moved out. Another time they had to move because she had wild parties when Mokey was at work. One time she took curtains that didn’t belong to her, and as a consequence the landlord filed a police report and Mokey had to pay for the curtains. Even after Mokey was divorced from her, there was trouble because one of her boyfriends kicked in the door to her apartment and she tried to blame it on Mokey so that he would have to pay for repairs. As Mokey said, Her boyfriend done run off to Hawaii. And I told the sergeant, ‘If I have to pay for that busted door, I’ll go to Hawaii and bust his ass, or my name ain’t Manfred Mulligan Mokey, Senior!’ And the sergeant says, ‘No, no, Mister Mokey- you can’t do that.’ And I said, ‘You want to bet? Just be sure and bring your own popcorn!’

The first time that Mokey found out that she was actually unfaithful he forgave her, so he said, on condition that she never play around again. And when he discovered that she did play around again he left her, so he told me through telling John. "I told her to stand aside, that I was leavin’. And she cried and pleaded, but her tears meant nothin’. And when she wouldn’t stand aside, I told her that I’d stand her aside if she didn’t move. And she stood