The Party Line

My grandmother gave the crank on the old wall mounted telephone box a vigorous twist, picked up the receiver and said Twenty-one, ring three, please, Elsie.

Elsie had been running the island's switchboard from her neat, little home across from Curt's Store for as long as anyone, even my grandmother, could remember. She was what was referred to as "a widow woman", a frail-looking, petite slip of a thing with a tone of voice that could melt butter or cut through granite, depending on her mood. Any call made to or from the island went through Elsie and she was an oracle of information who had little use for the notion of privacy. She and my grandmother had been friends for all their lives.

Elsie's switchboard was an impressive, old timey board with a maze of push and pull plugs, flashing lights and buzzers and tiny rows of numbers. Theoretically, she was on call twenty four hours every day, but telephone service frequently depended on her domestic chore schedule. If it was wash day, calls might or might not be placed promptly, if at all, and if Elsie had walked down to McIntyre's for groceries or to Curt's for snuff, calls simply died on the vine. Islanders had become accustomed to this and didn't much worry. Tracking someone down on an island twelve miles long was not an especially difficult thing to do - for a nickel, any child would run off in search of someone and deliver a message. Elsie served but liked to remind everyone that she was not a servant. She did, however, answer any and all calls placed in the middle of the night. She knew, as did we all, that

such calls were likely to be emergencies - someone sick or hurt or missing - and she was a vital link for such times, alert and efficient no matter the hour, ready in an instant to notify the volunteer fire crew or the doctor, on those rare occasions that we had one. Elsie was a first responder before the term had been invented.

She retired at the age of eighty something and handed over the lines of communication to the

Melanson sisters. Technology had simplified and automated things by then, telephone service had become something that needed to be overseen rather than provided. Fittingly, Elsie had the first so called "private line" but she was suspicious of it and rarely made or answered calls. Her's had been a job done long and well and she resisted and resented the changes, saying the personal touch had been lost and would never be found again.