WOODSTOCK – Barbara and Elden Hathaway were once asked by Johnny Carson what it was like to have a telephone switchboard in their living room in Bryant Pond.

“You know. Everything happened around the switchboard,” Barbara reportedly replied on the set of the show in New York in September 1982. A year later, the plug was pulled on the Bryant Pond Telephone Co., the last hand-cranked phone company in the country.

“It was the heartbeat of the community,” said Tom Thurston of Provincetown, Mass., who worked for the Hathaways starting in 1971 in exchange for room and board and the minimum wage of $1.80 an hour.

As Bryant Pond prepares to dedicate a sculpture of the hand-crank telephone to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the the day the town went from crank to dial phones, Thurston, now 61, recalled what it was like to work there.

“My job was working as a lineman in the morning until noon. In the afternoon I worked with Bob (McKeen on the switchboard),” Thurston said in a telephone interview from Provincetown earlier this week.

“Peeping frogs would sometimes compete with the operator’s voices on summer nights,” Thurston recalled. The two switchboards were set against a wall of windows in the pine-paneled living room overlooking a bog. Nearby was a television, Elden Hathaway’s easy chair, a gun rack, a long couch and multiple rocking chairs. Beside the switchboards was a bookcase filled with phone books for Lewiston, Portland, Augusta, and Fryeburg.

It was curiosity about the crank telephone that brought Thurston to the Hathaway doorstep.

“I was always fascinated by the crank phone in Meisner’s Store in Andover,” Thurston said. One day, he said, he asked where the Bryant Pond crank switchboard was and then went to the local crank phone booth.

“I gave it a crank and asked if it would be possible to see the switchboard,” Thurston said. The man on the other end of the phone was Bob McKeen, who gave him directions to the Hathaways, telling him to look for the line of cables running into the house from the road.

It wasn’t long before Thurston was operating the switchboard.

Nearly 40 years later, Thurston can still rattle off the line numbers.

“Two long and one short,” he said, was one of the coded rings assigned to each customer on the many multiparty lines. The operator would plug a cord into the jack on the board labeled “40” and manually produce two short rings over that line using a toggle key on the switchboard, Thurston said.

“Their telephone number would then consist of the line they were on followed by their ring, expressed in digits, which represented the number of rings which everybody on the line would hear,” Thurston explained.

Some party lines had 16 or more people on them. “Everyone heard everyone else,” said Thurston. The party lines cost customers $2.25 a month, a private line could be had for $3.90. Every toll call was listed by hand each night or the next morning on a preprinted piece of paper, Thurston said.

Each month – bill day was the 20th – Barbara Hathaway would sit down at her sewing machine, no thread in the needle but with a stack of mimeographed invoice blanks. She would run the invoices, a few at a time through the sewing machine to create a perforation down the middle of each sheet, said Thurston, so the customer could simply tear the bill in half along the holes and send in one half with the payment and keep the other half for their records. This method was used from 1951 until 1982, Thurston said.

“I grew up with that,” said Linda Hathaway Stowell of the switchboards and constant chatter in her parents’ home where she still lives. “We always had a baby sitter. It’s just the way it was. The operators were part of the family. It was a unique experience.”

Twenty-five years later, Barbara and Elden Hathaway have passed away and the last hand-crank phones used in the United States are scattered throughout the country. Many of the 1940s-style crank ringers that were found in a heap in the Hathaway garage are being sold online by their son Mike. Others were donated to the Maine State Museum in Augusta and others are still in homes throughout the Bryant Pond area, retained by customers who were allowed to keep the relics after the Oxford County Telephone & Telegraph Co. acquired the local phone company in 1983.

One of the last two crank phones ever rung up from the Bryant Pond Telephone Co. switchboard at the Hathaway home still hangs on the living room wall.

The last phone call was made to another hand-cranked telephone company in Grand River, Iowa, that had gone to dial two years earlier, Stowell said.

The simple message: “We said, `We’re signing off,'” Stowell recalled.