Towering connections

What began with a single telephone call to notify Jackson merchants when the steamboats docked at the Cape Girardeau riverfront has mushroomed into today's telephone-dependent society where cellular communications towers dot the landscape.

That first long-distance telephone call was made on Dec. 18, 1877. The call was carried over a telephone line erected along an old toll road that connected the two towns.

Jackson businessman S.B. Ferguson helped lead the effort to install the telephone service. But communication proved to be poor. Later the line was converted to carry telegraph signals.

Ironically, the first telegraph message from St. Louis to New Orleans -- sent July 27, 1850 -- passed through Cape Girardeau.

Cape Girardeau businessman Robert Sturdivant was on the board of directors of the company that built the line. The line extended through then heavily wooded Southeast Missouri. Few poles were erected. In many places, the wire was strung on trees, according to a 1935 article in the Southeast Missourian.

Not until 1896 was permanent telephone service established in Cape Girardeau.

A group of local businessmen formed the Cape Girardeau Telephone Co. and installed the first local switchboard in a small second-floor room of the Sturdivant Bank on Main Street.

The Boston Grocery, which stood on the site of what is now the Cape Girardeau Convention and Visitors Bureau, was the telephone company's first customer, according to Felix Snider and Earl Collins, who authored a history of Cape Girardeau in 1956.

The first central telephone exchange in Jackson was established in 1898 by Acme Telephone Co., according to newspaper accounts.

A telephone line linking Cape Girardeau and St. Louis was established in 1905.

Over the early decades of the 20th century, there were a number of telephone company mergers.

A 1921 Southeast Missourian story described a local exhibit that included one of the first telephones installed in Cape Girardeau. "The telephone is in the shape of a large wooden drum with a little bell on top which is rung when someone desires to talk. It has no receiver, the talking and receiving being through the same aperture," the newspaper reported.

Telephones were still a luxury for many Americans well into the 20th century. In 1960, one in five households had no telephone, according to U.S. census records.

But as of the 2000 census, only 2.4 percent of American homes had no telephone. In Missouri, that number was 2.9 percent.

In all, 64,114 homes had no telephones, according to the latest census. That's substantially less than in the 1960 census, when more than 300,000 households, or more than 22 percent of the homes, had no telephone.

Telephone booths once were a fixture in American towns. Jerry Amrhein of Scott City remembers the old wooden telephone booth that stood in a corner of a pharmacy his parents owned in the 1940s and 1950s. The telephone booth was installed before 1947, when his parents bought the pharmacy, he said.

Amrhein said the telephone booth was used often because many families didn't have phones in their homes.

The booth was removed in 1960. By then, Amrhein said, most area residents had phones in their homes.

When he was growing up, the family's home phone was on a party line. "There would be as many as three or four families on the same phone line," he said.

Conversations, he said, were rarely private. "You had to be awfully careful what you said to whom," Amrhein said.

Telephone calls in Scott City went through a switchboard housed in a commercial building. "The switchboard was on one side and a barbershop on the other," he said.

"They only had one operator working during the night," recalled Amrhein. "Once in a while she would be asleep when you called."

Telephone service has changed significantly over the past half-century. By 1951, Southwestern Bell Telephone was providing telephone service in the Cape Girardeau and Jackson area.

On June 28, 1952, area customers for the first time could dial people directly without going through a switchboard operator. Since then, there have been other improvements such as touch-tone phones, call forwarding, portable phones and cellular phones.

Antennas for cellular telephone service now tower over the landscape. Cape Girardeau alone has 43 cell-phone towers.

Wayne Smith, who now heads fund-raising efforts for Southeast Missouri State University, spent years in the telecommunications business. He helped set up the first cellular telephone network in Southeast Missouri in 1991.

Cell phones used to be bulky. "Now I have one of these phones that's barely bigger than a credit card," he said. "Tons of people carry cell phones."

The devices now carry more than conversation. Users can send text messages, take photos, catch up on their e-mail and access the Internet, Smith said.

Fourteen years ago, Smith said, some people laughed at the idea of cellular telephones in Southeast Missouri. They didn't see the need for such devices.

But today no one is laughing. Many people don't leave home without a cell phone.

"They are everywhere," Smith said.

mbliss@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 123