The telephone: A love/hate relationship
By BILL DUNCAN
The Elderstatesman
I have a confession to make. I do not own a cell phone.
There are a few of us dinosaurs roaming the earth including, I discovered Edward Grinnan, editor of Guideposts magazine, who made a similar confession in May to his readers. Like, Grinnan, I am not opposed to technology. In fact, I use it every day.
This very column is being written using the most modern of communication tools and it will be transported magically through cyberspace to reach its destination at a newspaper.
This does not mean I am willing to embrace being a microsecond away from intrusion on my personal world. I need solitude to think and be alone from the madden world swirling around me.
Like Mark Twain, who once said he sent Christmas greetings to everyone except the inventor of the telephone, I have a love-hate relationship with that annoying instrument even though I am still tied to a landline. That probably stems from my early newspaper reporting days when the telephone was a lifeline.
The telephone number of the first newspaper for which I reported was simply 22, but we never had to dial the number. In fact, there was no dial on the telephone a black instrument with a speaker mouthpiece and a receiver you lifted off a holder. An operator’s voice asked “number please.”
I learned the importance of this magic machine early on when I was assigned to cover a murder with an old timer named Bob Geivet. My editor told me to do everything he said, but not to get in his way. The body was discovered buried in an orange grove in remote Trabuco Canyon, located in the foothills of the Santa Ana Mountains in eastern Orange County, California.
Other news media had gathered at the law enforcement roadblock leading to the place where the shallow grave was found. Geivet instructed me to go back to a country store about a mile away, to get on the telephone and call our newspaper office, Under no circumstances he said, was I to surrender the telephone. As soon as the Orange County sheriff’s office began releasing details, reporters from other newspapers started coming into the country store, demanding I get off the phone so they could call in their stories. I took some verbal insults, but held fast to that one telephone within miles of the murder scene until Geivet arrived with his story.
I would go on to learn more from this mentor than I did in all my years in a classroom. Once again the two of us were on assignment miles from the nearest telephone when Geivet spotted a telephone linesman atop of pole using a telephone. Geivet climbed the pole and dictated his story to the newspaper from the top the pole.
When Geivet retired, he visited me in Roseburg. He was enthralled with the town of Myrtle Creek and its newspaper, then called The Myrtle Creek Mail. He wanted me to buy The Mail and hire him as a reporter. The town would have never been the same.
I don’t know if Geivet would have embraced the cell phone or not, but it if helped him get the story to the newspaper in a timely fashion, he probably would have.
Actually, we think of this new communications as a recent phenomenon, but it is actually ancient art dating back to 1886 when Reginald Fessenden, a Canadian inventor who had worked with Thomas Edison, developed a two-way radio telephone. World War II greatly improved communication, including that antiquated stick telephone I started using on my first newspaper job. The first handheld mobile phone was developed in 1973 by Motorola and looked much like the World War II Walkie-Talkie. Now that huge instrument is so tiny it can fit in one’s ear.
For me, that is going too far in this “reach out and touch somebody” society.
(Bill Duncan can be reached at bduncan@nrtoday.com or by writing to P.0. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 94770,)