Historic Hood River
“Operator, How May I Direct Your Call?”
12-15-2025
Notes
This cyanotype of an early telephone switchboard is associated with a collection of A. C. Buck and mentions his daughter Nettie Buck. We’ve also seen this image of the Hood River switchboard in the 1930s. They are different switchboards in different rooms. We know from this article in The Hood River Glacier that Nettie Buck worked for Pacific States Telephone in Hood River up to the end of 1906. It appears from other mentions in the Glacier she worked in Portland after that, so I suspect this image is from 1906 or earlier. That would predate the 1912 building we now know as the Dean Building. We’ll see some support for that earlier date tomorrow.
L. E.
Looks like the old movies.
Arlen
Total “comfort” in those chairs!
Alan B Winston
In 1967-68 I worked a then-ancient plug and socket switchboard very much like these in my college dorm. We had 60 to 70 or so local lines, to a phone in each hallway, each office, and in the lounge areas, plus several outside lines. Mostly we connected calls from outside to the appropriate local line. I think that calls to outside mostly used payphones in the hallways. To this day, if I plug or unplug a quarter-inch headphone jack, I have flashbacks to that experience. I see that the old dorm, which had been converted to offices shortly after my time there, was torn down in 2024. A pleasant surprise to have my birthplace refreshing my college memories.