Communication Over the Years: From the Pen and Talking in Town to the Phone and Modern Times

Hello everybody. I hope you all had a merry Christmas and are looking forward to a happy new year!

I would like to thank the Mayos for allowing me the opportunity to to tell some stories here in the Murfreesboro Pulse. It’s been a highlight of mine for the last couple of years. I would also like to congratulate Bracken, Sarah and their staff on 20 years of the Murfreesboro Pulse telling its unique story!

With that said, I thought this month we could cover a topical question: how did we communicate in days past?

Let’s first take it back nearly 100 years. How did we communicate with one another then? Well, there was a thing called the landline telephone. It just so happens my great-grandfather Harry Cranford was the Bell South manager here at the local phone company in the 1930s. This was the time when everybody dressed up to go to work and the little ladies wore their nicest dresses and operated the switchboard, as seen in the photo here. That’s my grandfather, keeping an eye on them. Notice the Edison lightbulb hanging from the ceiling.

Before telephones, which in those days had party lines where the switchboard operators could listen in to conversations, there would be folks of different occupations who would gather around the Square drinking up Coke and telling stories about their lives, like those seen in this photo.

If you notice in this photo, there’s a butcher, a barber and the phone company manager sipping on a Coke, appearing to just have gotten through eating some hot fish.

By the way, that old phone company building today is the Five on Black restaurant, which I hear has delicious fare.

My favorite way of communicating as a kid growing up was having a pen pal. That’s where you wrote a letter to a kid about your same age who lived in Montana (or some other state outside your own) and hopefully within 60 days you would get a letter back from your pen pal. I remember it being such a big to-do going out to the mailbox anticipating a letter from my pen pal.

My pen pal was a girl by the name of Gwen Green. Of course, this was in the fourth grade, and you would’ve thought I had hung the moon. This girl Gwen took time to send me a photo of herself for some reason. I shut it down and didn’t write back, so Gwen, if you’re out there, I’m sorry it just didn’t work out.

You might ask yourself are we better off today with our social media and all of its clickbait, and all of the times that we pick up the phone?

Heck, the next time you’re at the Avenue, just go up to somebody and say hello and introduce yourself, but if they smack you and say “mind your own business,” you didn’t hear it from Mr. Murfreesboro. Or, if that doesn’t work, write a letter to your Aunt Susie and ask her if she would be your pen pal.