Word: cranked
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...village store and the post office. Bryant Pond would be a dot on the map, located by reference to nearby towns with such names as Norway, Paris and Mexico, if it were not for one curious fact: this little way station happens to be the home of the last crank-telephone system in the U.S. Here is how it works. Somewhere in the modest stillness of Bryant Pond, someone rotates a crank, jangling the bell on the call box and generating enough current to cause a tab with the caller's number to click down on the switchboard...
arrangement. Although nearly half of the 434 customers now have private phones, the party line is still a distinctive part of the crank system. As many as 23 customers have been known to share a single line. Courtesy requires that a party-liner give a little ring when signing off to notify the others that the line is clear. One sociable lady has made a habit of giving a little ding when she comes on, extending an invitation to her neighbors to tune in for lively listening. Eighty years ago, when the first switchboard occupied the back of Dudley...
...pulled himself out of bed to man the phones more midnights than he cares to remember, wakened by a night-alarm gong from the switchboard and a kick or two from his wife Barbara, who with her daughter Susan may have logged more hours than any two operators in crank-phone history...
...this homey and tenuous network tore apart, and the town with it, when the new owner, the Oxford County Telephone & Telegraph Co., announced it was replacing crank with dial. Before you could say d.a., a "Don't Yank the Crank" committee was formed. T shirts displaying that motto went on sale in Brad Hooper's village store. There were town meetings and more town meetings. Lawyers were hired, and briefs got filed with the public utilities commission to prevent the conversion to dial, and even void the sale...
...Long's Lumber Yard, where they planed on all four sides, true and square, and a cannery where a boy could pick up a damaged tin of creamed corn for a free lunch on his way to a day of fishing. After so much loss, why should a crank-telephone switchboard in the back room of his home lay claim to immortality...