Behind the Voice with a Smile: Large Type

By Nelly Nallon

The Bell System telephone operator was touted in much of AT&Ts advertising as The Voice with a Smilea young, demure girl wearing a metal headset with a black transmission horn hanging around her neck. The Voice with a Smile equated to courteous, dependable around-the-clock service, and year after year she was voted by many Americans to be the symbol of courtesy, but that was certainly not the whole storynot by a long shot!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Jul 30, 2014
• ISBN: 9781490742991

Nelly Nallon

Nelly Nallon was born in Carbondale, Pennsylvania, on October 2, 1928, and was the youngest of seven children, two boys and five girls. She attended John Marshall Elementary School, Roosevelt Junior High, and Benjamin Franklin High School for four years. Benjamin Franklin was the regional high school for five surrounding communities. At her graduation ceremony, Nelly was greatly honored as the valedictorian of the graduating class of 256 students and was awarded a full four-year scholarship to attend New Jersey’s prestigious Princeton University. However, because her father had been killed in an industrial accident when Nelly was twelve years old, and with a very sick mother in dire need for Nelly to care for her, Nelly was unable to take advantage of that well-deserved and fully-paid for scholarship at Princeton University.

Book preview

~ Chapter One~

The Return to Eastmont

Ellen Nallon squints as she searches for the parkway entrance through the wild, frenzied March storm that beats against the windshield of her silver Camaro. Was it really over ten years since she drove on this parkway for what she prayed, and vehemently swore, would be the last time? Would her return from Florida to the Bell Telephone’s Eastmont traffic office reunion resurrect the painful memories she had worked so hard to put to rest?

Ellen had just about convinced herself that curiosity was the prime factor in her decision to attend the Bell System’s Eastmont traffic office reunion. Certainly, one could not have worked so many years with a group of people and not wonder what had become of them! She frowns as she remembers her therapist’s suggestion that her decision to make the long, arduous drive north to attend this reunion was triggered by a compulsion to return and, somehow, alter the past.

The storm had not diminished and the swirling cascade of sleet and snow continued to pelt her windshield, but the broad, straight parkway lanes with the freshly-painted white lines make it possible for Ellen to maintain a reasonable speed. Checking her watch, she realizes it is past five o’clock, and in an hour it will be dark. Unfortunately, she will also hit the workers’ traffic as they head for their homes. She promises herself that once she checks into a motel she will take a warm, leisurely shower and just relax. There will be plenty of time tomorrow to drive around and scout the area, since the Eastmont reunion would not start until 8 P.M.

As she nears the Eastmont exit, Ellen cannot ignore the sudden chill that envelops her body. Despite the emotional and geographical distancing from Eastmont that she had struggled to achieve, she is painfully aware that Eastmont can still trigger deep apprehension and ominous vibrations within her.

Sighting a Holiday Inn, Ellen veers to the right toward the exit ramp and is amazed at the changes that have taken place in the area. Several other motels, a couple of fast food restaurants, two gas stations, and a small strip mall now occupy the huge, barren stretch of land that had once bordered the parkway. After squeezing the Camaro into a tight parking slot, she pulls the hood of her raincoat tightly around her head, races toward the brightly lit entrance to McDonalds and orders a quarter pounder and a large coffee—no use having to come back out into the unyielding winter storm once she has checked in at the motel.

Finally stepping out of the warm shower she had been envisioning for the last hundred miles, Ellen reaches for her thick, wooly robe, turns off the overhead light, and pushing a chair closer to the big motel window, she stares out into the murky darkness of the night. Experiencing once again the wretched, bone-chilling cold and the grey bleakness of an Eastmont winter, Ellen is suddenly overwhelmed by a surge of memories of another March day so very long ago.

~ Chapter Two~

The Beginning

The month is March, and Ellen is seventeen and back in Eastmont. A heavy snow mixed with sleet has persisted through yet another cold winter day, and the roads are covered with ice and snow turned black from the noxious exhausts of an endless flow of cars and trucks entering and leaving the city.

Ellen is attempting to stomp the snow from her boots before she enters the Bell System Employment Office, but the frozen snow resists her efforts. Lining up behind a dozen other young girls who are waiting their turn to complete an application for the position of operator, she is finally handed the lengthy form. After another long wait, the application is reviewed by a stern, unsmiling women who repeats, parrot-like, what she has said to each of the other girls, Eastmont is not hiring at the present, but we will keep your application on file in case there is an opening.

Discouraged, Ellen walks out into the bitter cold, heads for the Walgreens lunch counter on the corner, and orders a cup of coffee. After paying the waitress, she gets another coin ready as she waits patiently at the bus stop for the long ride home.

Three months later she receives a call and is sent for an interview at the local Bell Telephone employment office. Now, sitting in the darkened motel room, Ellen is astonished that she still remembers many of the interviewer’s questions, some of which she thought at the time were rather personal and had absolutely nothing to do with the job. Had she found school boring? What did she think of her teachers? Was she living at home? Was her father working? What were her home duties? Did she pay board at home? Was there a day of the week she could not work—perhaps because of her religion? Did she plan to go to college? Was she dating? How frequently?

The questions were asked randomly and very casually, with no apparent order or importance; yet, in hindsight, Ellen realizes the interviewer had actually determined the economic conditions in her home, if she was self-supporting, if she had family responsibilities or religious obligations that would preclude working any scheduled day, if a steady boyfriend might discourage her from working evenings, if there was a chance she might leave to further her education, if she could accept authority, would she likely be able to handle the repetitive nature of the job, and did she respect people in authority.

Ellen closes her eyes as she remembers being asked to stand against a square column, which she assumed had been installed for structural purposes, and to stretch first her right arm and then her left arm as far as she could. The interviewer appeared to be estimating how far her arms extended across the brown and beige square tiles on the floor. Ellen guessed by the interviewer’s smile that her arms must be long enough to be a Bell telephone operator.

Although Ellen had never liked math, she remembers that portion of the employment test as being easy, with simple addition and subtraction problems. She would eventually learn that the Bell System considered the traffic department to be their factory branch, and after determining a job applicant had normal vision and hearing and spoke clearly in the English language, they looked primarily for those who would likely accept rigid discipline and endure stressful, physically demanding work.

An appointment was made for a rather cursory physical examination in a medical building a few blocks away, and when it was completed, the doctor excused himself for a moment. Returning, he motioned to a telephone on his desk, handed her a card with a number imprinted on it, and instructed Ellen to call Miss Stuart, the chief operator at Eastmont, the local telephone office.

Miss Stuart answered on the first ring. When Ellen identified herself, she was told she had passed her physical and was to begin a three-week training period at the Eastmont office at 7 A.M. on June 28. When Ellen assured her she could, Miss Stuart replied, Fine, Miss Nallon. I will see you then.

Ellen heard a click and realized the conversation had ended. Ellen would soon learn that this was the way Miss Stuart did things: She made swift decisions. There would be no wasted words or emotions.

~ Chapter Three~

Suzanne Stuart

Sitting in the quiet of the motel room, Ellen is both surprised and dismayed at the negative feelings that the memory of Miss Stuart has rekindled.

Suzanne Stuart was probably in her early forties but could easily have passed for thirty. Her hair was a pale champagne beige, with each precision-cut strand always exactly in place. Miss Stuart never had a bad-hair-day! Some operators sarcastically remarked that they could not imagine her allowing a man to run his fingers through her hair or smear her perfectly applied makeup. Most operators were convinced that she always slept alone. Some jokingly wanted to make bets on it, but it would have been impossible to collect on such a wager because so little was known about Suzanne Stuart.

She and two male managers from the accounting department ate their lunches in the rear booth of the Stratford Restaurant. She never went into the employees’ cafeteria for her coffee break and used only the management lounge and rest room. The one thing the office force knew for certain was that she had transferred from a New York Bell Telephone office and had kept her Manhattan apartment.

Suzanne possessed the grace and bearing of a trained dancer, and she wore classically cut designer dresses which somehow never wrinkled—long before polyester became popular. She was probably about 5'7", but with her perfect posture and her polished, aloof voice and demeanor, she seemed so much taller.

During the years Suzanne was at Eastmont, the traffic force, including her assistant chiefs, the supervision staff and the operators all worked under terribly stressful conditions. From the moment Miss Stuart arrived and walked into her office at precisely 8:45 each morning, the tension was almost overwhelming. And inside her deeply tinted, glass-enclosed office is precisely where she remained most of the time! From there she could observe everything: If calls were being answered promptly; whether the supervisors, whose actual title was service assistant, but who were routinely referred to as SA’s, were walking behind the operators and pointing out waiting signals—their principal responsibility! She also could observe if anyone was tardy or came back late from a lunch or relief period or if an operator turned her head or spoke to an adjacent operator. From a specially equipped black telephone in her office, she could listen in on the operators and the supervisory force, and she could also monitor the clerical staff’s telephone calls at the big mahogany desk in the center of the office (which was always referred to as the operating room.

Miss Stuart rarely found it necessary to rub elbows with the operating force because she delegated most of the responsibility for discipline to her assistant chief, Miss Peggy Palmer, to whose attention she would bring any observed infraction or situation that was not standard toll office practice. Miss Palmer would immediately bring the infraction to the attention of the service assistant (SA) in that section, and the SA would instruct the operator to step out of her position, sit on the highchair (seen by the force as the baby’s highchair) next to the SA’s highchair, and there she would reprimand the operator in view of the other employees. It appeared that a correction could never be made by simply plugging in with the operator and quietly bringing the transgression to her attention. The embarrassment of having to sit on the highchair was always an integral part of discipline.

Ellen smiles as she remembers Eastmont’s assistant chief. Peggy Palmer was a nervous, mousey woman with greying brown hair which she had worn braided and wrapped tightly around her head for the last twenty years. Short in stature and reed-thin, she favored drab colors and demure, matronly dresses—in sharp contrast to Miss Stuart’s chic attire. Miss Palmer always wore brown tennis shoes at work, and it was generally agreed that she could walk to within a few inches of an employee, who would never hear her approach. Ellen soon learned that in the Bell System a management employee did not have to be tall or muscular or aggressive to handle discipline in a large traffic office. The magnitude of the power readily available to every management person (which could sometimes be set in motion by a mere suggestion to the employee’s SA) could then wind itself up or down the chain of command. Yes, mused Ellen, Walk softly and carry a big stick (power) surely proved true at Eastmont.

The smile fades