Word: switchboard
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Chicago Stadium last week, extra switchboard operators kept up a singsong chant: "Sorry, no tickets." On the big night, 21,866 fans jammed into the big arena while 5,000 waited outside, unmindful of rain and sleet. It was the largest crowd ever to watch a professional basketball game. The attraction: the amazing Harlem Globetrotters, a razzle-dazzle Negro team which was riding a 113-game winning streak, v. the Minneapolis Lakers, rated the best white team in existence and sparked by towering (6 ft. 10 in.) George Mikan, the basketball player of the half-century...
Beside the American stood his British assistant, grey-haired, once debonair Edgar Sanders; a Hungarian barmaid (listed as "Baroness" to give her the proper upper-class air), Edina Dory, who had worked as an I.T. & T. switchboard operator; a Hungarian official of I.T. & T., Imre Geiger; and three more Hungarians accused of complicity in the "spy ring...
...larger switchboard had been installed on the top floor of Lehman Hall, but had to move to its present location because of vibrations from Square traffic on the higher floor. Increasing use of the University system led to installation of an automatic dial system in 1948. The shiny steel equipment and colored wires now occupy the room next to the switchboard, which employs four operators during the day and one at night. Besides calls to College buildings, users of the system can call graduate schools, Radcliffe and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology directly on University lines...
Lehman headquarters does more than answer KI 7-7600 calls. Those small red lamps attached to various buildings around the College are also part of the telephone system. These, when lit, summon University policemen; near each light is a telephone connected like the light, directly with the switchboard. Even when there is no particular trouble brewing, and there usually isn't, the policeman must call in once every hour during the day, and every half-hour from midnight to dawn. When there is a really big disturbance, like last fall's Square riot, the switchboard becomes an intelligence center, directing...
Perhaps the greatest task over handled by the staff was the "checking in" after the Coconut Grove fire in 1940. Every serviceman in the New England District as well as civilian College students had to report to the University switchboard. While there is nothing quite so glamorous in the way of public service these days, operators are often called on to do more than put the right plug in the right hole for many callers. Of people wanting information, contest enterers are the most demanding; they ply the Harvard operators with an infinite variety of obscure queries. And then there...