THE STATE LONG DISTANCE TIME LINE 1900 State Long Distance Telephone Company is organized. 1903 Elkhorn has one phone for every 50 residents. Net earnings $329.45. 1906 Walworth County Telephone Company is purchased by State Long Distance. 1928 Wiswell & Swan retain independent control after stock war. 1929 Sleet storm sends 250 company posts to the ground. 1932 Public Service Commission of Wisconsin is established. 1934 FCC created to provide nationwide communications. 1940 40th anniversary / Charles Wiswell's 37 years as president celebrated. 1946 Anna Wiswell succeeds husband, Charles, as president. Florence Coleman joins company. 1955 Kellog Crossbar "ultimate" dial switching equipment installed. 1962 Automatic toll ticketing permits direct long distance dialing. 1968 Wyman "Pat" Wiswell succeeds Anna as president. 1969 FCC opens long distance market to common carriers. 1973 110 miles of underground cable extends service area. Move to present building at 216 West Walworth Street. 1980 William Wiswell elected president. 1981 Computerized record keeping installed. 1983 Computerized digital switching equipment expands features. 1984 SLD Services established. 1985 Walworth County Complex PBX switch installed. 1991 Equal Access (customers pick long distance carrier). NEAX 61E Digital Switch installed in Elkhorn. 1992 Computerized mapping computer purchased. Standardized trouble reporting codes assures uniformity between employees. WSLD "Your Home in the Country" on the air. 1993 First piece of cable for Fiber Optic "backbone" buried. 1994 Tele-Comm Formed. Extended Community Calling. 10 Digit Dialing. Second phase of fiber backbone complete. County wide Enhanced "911" service. 1995 Class Services added to both the Elkhorn/Lauderdale switches. Future Fiber Optic Development. Converted EAS trunks to SS7 to support Caller ID. Introduction of "TownSquare" Local Internet Access. 1996 Upgrading existing optic channel facilities (OC12) to OC48 for features like Medical Imaging, Video Distance Learning, Video Arraignment. Installation of Voice Mail 1997 ElkNet Internet Service established. 1999 Lucent 5ESSŪ Central Office Switching Systems installed at the Elkhorn and Lauderdale exchanges. 2000 State Long Distance Telephone Company celebrates 100 years of service to the community! 2005 ElkNet DSL service available. Company Photo Journal One historic day in America's Centennial Year of 1876 - it was March 10, to be exact - a bewhiskered and somewhat rumpled gentleman leaned over his laboratory table and spoke into the vertical horn of a crude electrical instrument, "Mr. Watson," he said, "come here; I want you." The words transformed as if by magic into scratchy electrical impulses, somehow traversed a wire to be reassembled into words and emerge at the other end. A few seconds later, Alexander Graham Bell's assistant appeared in the laboratory door in answer to the summons, and the first practical telephone was reality. A scant 24 years after that momentous day - October 14, 1900, as long as we are being exact - a handful of woolen shirted, heavy booted men clumped up the stairs to the Grand Army of the Republic meeting hall above Harley Norris' hardware store in tiny Elkhorn, Wisconsin. They had driven into town, most of them in buggies and wagons, to attend a meeting called by a semi-mystery man from out of state - "a promoter who came from Kentucky driving a pair of dapple-gray bob-tailed mares" was how the local paper described him. The stranger was there to urge the people at the meeting - leaders of the Elkhorn vicinity's farm community, they were - to organize a telephone company. A telephone company? But didn't Elkhorn already have two telephone companies? Unaccountably, yes; but their lines did not venture outside the town limits to the isolated farm houses that sailed the rolling pastures and undulating grain fields like white clapboard ships. The man from Kentucky was persuasive; he pointed out that there was already one telephone for one and three-quarters out of every 100 Americans, right then in 1900. And the farmers up there in the GAR Hall had no intention of letting progress pass them by. When the meeting broke up, they had formed a new telephone company - State Long Distance - and had agreed to buy stock in it to defray the cost of erecting poles and stringing wires out to their farms. City folk, be damned! They were going to have their own telephone company! When it came time to start building the lines, no bank would loan the new company a dime, but its officers and directors signed personal notes to raise startup capital and the lines went up. In 1903, Charles H. Wiswell, who farmed 250 acres outside Elkhorn and had been at the meeting above Norris' hardware store, joined with three other men to by out the interest of the promoter. That gentleman promptly harnessed up his dapple-grays and drove off in the general direction of Kentucky. The telephone business was looking up by the end of 1903: there was a phone for 2 out of every 100 people. Charles Wiswell was elected vice president of State Long Distance that year. A few months later he became president. In the years to come, he would thrice more be elected president, each time after the job had been held by someone else. Wiswell, alone, it seemed, had the magic touch required to keep the young company profitable, growing, and independent. He kept on working his 250 acres, which was just as well since none of the officers received a penny in salary for the companies first 15 years. The telephone was something to cope with in those early days, and not everyone was up to it. When a subscriber wanted to make a call, he would approach the wall-mounted, oblong oak box, cross his fingers, lift the receiver from its hook, and listen. Every line was a party line shared by anywhere from eight to 12 competitive conversationalists, and the would-be user needed luck. If all was quiet, he would give the crank a lusty twirl or two. The operator, sitting in the central office of the telephone company on a high swivel chair in front of a confusing infestation of wires, would see a jack drop and hear it click. That was her signal to plug a connecting wire into the jack and intone, "Number plee-uzz." Nighttime crank twirlers got nowhere, since by eight o'clock the operator had disconnected everything, locked up and gone home to dinner and a good book. Naturally, this kind of system had its problems. The State Long Distance Directory for 1914 tried to umpire disputes among its 600 subscribers before they arose by publishing these guidelines for telephone etiquette: 1. Calls are limited to three minutes. 2. No party should hold the line longer than five minutes. 3. Do not take down receiver when others are using the line. 4. Don't waste the operator's time in useless talk. 5. If you will ring off, the operator will not have to listen to know when you are through. But the indoor difficulties that may have plagued the subscribers and operators of the tiny company, annoying though they were, never held a candle to what happened outdoors, especially in winter. Superintendent Howard Vincent used to tell of the vicious winters. He remembers replacing wagon wheels, harnessing up a team, and setting off on an emergency call across pastures choked with snow, cutting fences as he went...remembers trouble shooting on snowshoes...remembers hitching a company horse to a company sleigh at seven one morning, heading for a line-break seven miles from town and not getting there until five in the afternoon. The black cold that sometimes paralyzes southern Wisconsin can also raise hell with overhead lines. "Back when we were using open iron wire it would crystallize at around 20 below and snap in the wind," Vincent remarks. "We'd spend all day putting up broken lines and find them down again in the morning." Snow and cold are bad enough, but the telephone lineman's natural enemy is sleet. In 1929, a howling ice storm sent 250 of the company's poles crashing to the frozen ground. Another wild storm played an encore in 1949. Until 1972, when most of the company's lines went underground, few winters passed without sleet wreaking some degree of havoc. One February when sleet and wind leveled dozens of electric utility poles, the State Long Distance emergency crew commandeered batteries from a half-dozen cars, wired them in, and ran the company for eight hours on them. It was then that this vignette took place: Operator (responding to a call): We're taking emergency calls only. Is this an emergency? Woman Caller: It sure is! My lights are out and the electric company's got to fix 'em. The old sow's havin' pigs and I want to watch! Somehow, after every disaster State Long Distance seemed to come back stronger than ever - and that was due in no small measure to Charlie Wiswell's steady hand at the helm. Wiswell not only ran the company from day to day; he also fought fiercely to preserve its independence. Once, in the Thirties, he succeeded by an eyelash in beating back a Chicago financer's bid to seize the company by quietly buying up stock: Wiswell found out about it, and at the last moment managed to locate and buy the four shares on which control of the company hinged. Today, the independence of small telephone companies is assured through commitments made by the giants in the industry. When the senior Wiswell died in 1945, his son, Wyman, became president and general manager until 1980. Now his sons are in the business: Bill as president and general manager; and Grant as facilities manager. Though its 6500 subscribers and 8000 access lines make it larger than most of the other 86 independent telephone companies in Wisconsin (there are 1300 in the country), State Long Distance remains small by conventional standards. By continually upgrading their phone system, the benefits are passed on to the customer, resulting in the same custom calling features and services as in large metropolitan areas. Features like caller ID and Call Waiting, as well as growth in the community and demand for additional lines will make a continual request for upgrades. Today, the company's insignia rides on the sides of 11 service and repair trucks, a digger-truck, an aerial lift truck, and other digging equipment. Not bad for a company that in the early 20th century was run with two men, a chain-drive truck with solid rubber tires, and a horse and wagon. Where We Are Going The commitment made in 1900 - to keep your telecommunications contacts with the world fast, efficient, effective - has become more challenging than ever before. Technological developments in the communications field through microwave, satellite and fiber-optics transmissions made the development of new concepts and methods of voice and data transmission inevitable. Coupled with these massive technological advances came the divestiture of the largest telephone system in the world, ending the regulated monopoly, permitting unregulated competition and freedom of choice. Your demand for information created the need for equipment geared to today's special challenges in the communications field. Voice-data integrated systems operating as total information management tools will be necessary to manage information more effectively, move and process it with greater speed, and utilize it in a more sophisticated manner. It will be vital to access the hundreds of commercial data services which offer a wide range of information through computer data bases. The telephone has become the cornerstone of all future communication systems. And our commitment to provide the best systems in both your home and office, continues. Our relationship to our subscribers continues to be that of extending our technical expertise based on years of service to the community. We look forward to the challenges inherent in that relationship. We look forward to putting the technological resources of the future into your hands. We look forward to keeping your telecommunications contacts with the world a little bit faster - a little bit more effective - and a little more efficient. Thank you for your business!