EARLY TELEPHONES IN FAIRFAX

Hi All,
Well, for those of you that no longer live in Fairfax, you will notice by this particular note, that it doesn't take a lot to peak our interest here in town, or I should probably say, "My Interest."

About a week or so ago, Donna Meunier gave me a 1938 St. Albans phone book that belonged to her mother Florence (Barkyoumb) Magnan. Well, to say the least, I was elated. The phone book is in excellent condition and has all the phone numbers as they were in 1938 for Fairfax, Fletcher and Westford, all 140 of them.

I decided to scan through the Internet and see if I could find some photos of these old telephones and the switchboard as I remembered them, and that I did. We've come a long ways from those old phones to the present day cellular phones which were only a pipe dream back in those days.

Actually, it wasn't that long ago that here in Fairfax we stopped having to give our home phone number when we made a long distance call. I happened to be on a pilot program for IBM when they were experimenting with communication from home via the personal computer in the mid 1980s. Our programers gave me a floppy disk to use to link up with the main computer at the plant, but try as I might, I couldn't get it to work. Eventually, one of the programmers looked into the matter and found that our telephone system here in Fairfax required us to give our long distance phone number. Well, this particular programmer had never heard of such a thing, but re-wrote a whole program for me so that I could intervene in the connection to give my phone number.

Those of you that have links to Old Fairfax, may find it interesting to look at who had phones in the area and those of you that don't remember these old style phone, might be interested in how we communicated by phone in the old days.

To view the History of Telephone here in Fairfax and also see a few photos, one of which I took myself of a former Fletcher Resident using one of these phones.

To view go to the following link:

http://www.vtgrandpa.com/newsclips/telephone_1938.html

Have a great day,
Henry