Crank Calls

Too often on the heels of progress come standardization, conformity and impersonality. The citizens of Bryant Pond, Me. (pop. 500) have decided to keep at least one automated evil at bay. The town is the last in New England to rely completely on a magneto crank telephone system. When the proposal to replace the magneto phones with modern equipment came before the public utilities commission recently, more than 200 townspeople showed up to defend the system.

Nearly all the town's 341 subscribers said that they relished cranking their telephones to signal the operator, since someone familiar was bound to be at the other end. The six local operators connect subscribers by name as readily as by number, and the 40 seconds or so it takes for them to put through a call constitute, for most of the townspeople, a gossipy interval to be savored rather than speeded up. Each local operator is at once town crier, rumor center and community commissioner of safety. How can a system that depends so deeply on amity and fraternity be compared with the hum, buzz and click of automated equipment? Said one resident: "Like the pelican, it may be forced into extinction. But I feel it is superior."

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