Been Around the Block. Got Some Stories. These are Them.
June 3, 1983, Hollywood: The movie “WarGames” was released. My good friend, Harvey Warnke, created these huge display screens that you see in the movie, just as you see them in this famous scene from the film.
That was 40 years ago. He actually created these huge displays with dozens of slide projectors, projecting from behind the set, triggering them remotely, because computers at the time [Read more…]
San Francisco, September 1971: This was the Yellow-Page ad that created Network Answering Service in San Francisco. It worked.
Here’s what happened:
On the lower right corner of this artwork, the artist’s signature is “LEI,” which stands for Steve Leialoha, who lived in the mission district of San Francisco. And if you go get an old “Howard the Duck” comic book. then in the comic book, you will see that the “inker” for Howard the Duck was … Steve Leialoha.
They make comic book artwork in two steps: (1) a guy, using pencil, maps out each page’s layout (and they can make any pencil corrections), and then [Read more…]
San Francisco, September 12, 1976: This is called a switchboard.
In Henrietta, Texas, in the upstairs (outside staircase, on the right) of the building at Bridge and Gilbert, on the corner of the courthouse square, was the phone company before dial phones were available. that was the phone company before the new building was built over by the Methodist Church, and before the time Mac McGilvray ran the phone company. [CLICK HERE TO SEE THAT BUILDING TODAY] In that upper floor were several switchboards, and that’s where the operator(s) were before the advent of dial-phones. You picked up the phone and asked Gladys to connect you to the Watson’s house.
After dial-phones, high school, and heading off to North Texas State University, I learned to operate a switchboard when I worked at Holiday Inn in Denton, and switchboards were still widely in use in the hotel/hospitality industry for inter-room and inside/outside calls for decades after that.
Years earlier, starting back east, the very first answering services had been created when some entrepreneurs obtained AT&T switchboards, and located themselves in a calling area (ie: near the “central office” where calls are switched, serving one particular neighborhood, identified by the prefix of the phone number. In Henrietta, I think it was Evergreen, but I’m not sure I’m remembering correctly, because San Francisco also had Evergreen exchange, north of Golden Gate Park.)
These first answering services worked like this: They had the phone company wire an extension of the business’s phone and the two wires were connected to ONE of the holes in the switchboard. In this way, when the business was closed, the calls were also “ringing” on the small red light beneath that hole. At the back of the console, shown above, you see the red objects which are plugs. You grab the left-side plug of any pair of plugs, shove it into the hole and now your headset (if you’re the operator) is live as you’ve just “answered” the call, like people at home do when they lift the receiver. Now the caller asks for the Watson’s house, or for room 117, and you plug the right-side plug of that pair into the Watson’s plug or room 117’s plug, and flip the small toggle switch in front of that pair of plugs. This rings the target phone at the Watson’s or room 117.
When the Watsons or room 117 answer, you flip the toggle another way, and you are removed from the conversation. You get another red light when the parties hang up.
All answering services around the country used switchboards to provide answering service to businesses right up until 1976 in San Francisco, when one day I got an advertisement falling out of my phone bill. It was for this new feature, “Call Forwarding.”
I was stoned at that moment and picked up the advertisement, and then said to myself. “I could use this to build an answering service, without the need for a switchboard.”
And … that’s what I did. The beginning of Network Answering Service.
A few years later, and 80% of the answering services in San Francisco had transitioned away from switchboards, to call-forwarding and new types of equipment.
That’s how it happened. Thank you, switchboards!
3304 Geary Boulevard, San Francisco 1980’ish — When we opened Network Answering Service in my studio apartment in 1976, it was because I’d realized that the phone company’s new “Call Forwarding” service would enable me to build an answering service without the need to buy a switchboard, which also needs a LOT of costly wiring. The downside of my method was that when our phone rang, the incoming call could be for ANY of our clients. But who?
So we’d answer, “Network Answering Service, who are you calling please?”
Oddly enough, this worked rather well, and so we grew.
But when we outgrew my studio apartment at 3rd and Anza, north of Golden Gate park, we had to [Read more…]
San Francisco, 1980: We’d outgrown my studio apartment on Third Avenue. Network Answering Service, the operators who answered the phones, the Thumbtack Bugle, plus the bookkeeper, and me. Time to move.
I searched Arguello. I searched Clement, and Balboa. I searched California Street. I found a second-story flat on Geary Boulevard, on the corner of Parker across from the Post Office. I walked the wooden floors in the empty rooms; it was a vast space, cheery with sunlight, and smelling of new varnish.
On the street below, the phone company was digging up the concrete in the middle of the street, so they could run our phonelines. I watched through the sunny windows. Never before had anybody dug up a street for me. This must be the big time!
For three weeks straight, I built shelving and set up our new workspace. Rosie the Cat kept me company. I got new lamps and large plants.
In the foyer at the top of the stairs, I installed four KitKat clocks, with wagging eyes and tails. On the wall, all in a row, I had three black ones, with signs saying London, Paris, Tokyo. Then a pink one with rhinestones labeled San Francisco. Oh, we had arrived.
As it turned out, the foyer lacked light for the plants, and the operators wore out my rugs. The KitKat clocks gave out over time, and heating was a problem, as the thermostat was in one room and the heater in another; adjustment was, to say the least, tricky. Operators solved it by running the heater at full blast, while opening windows to let in the cool air. In this way they made themselves comfortable.
I explained that we would not be able to heat up Geary Boulevard. This made no impression.
I tore up some twenty dollar bills and tossed the pieces out the window, just as an example. That made an impression, of a sort, but little difference.
The cats, Rosie and Cosmo, liked the new digs.Then operator Anita found Morgan, just a tiny kitten abandoned in a paper bag, to join our crew. At first I lived in the large, dark-paneled room at the rear. There it was that I asked Lori to marry me. She said yes, we got married, we moved to an apartment at the corner of Carl and Cole streets.
I set up a development lab, and began designing the Line Seizer, an electronic device that talked with the telephone company’s central office as they sent calls to our answering service, identifying for our operators which client’s phone was ringing in to us. I took to wearing overalls like I’d seen real computer guys do.
There were excitements and triumphs, troubles and despairs, dramas and traumas. The actors came and went. Along the way, Lori and I estranged ourselves, and she ran the answering service while I took a job which carried me to Newport Beach, then Texas, then back to San Francisco, where we then sold the answering service. A manager was found for the voicemail business, I became a private investigator. Rooms were rented out.
One day, a notice from the city. Zoning problem. Time to move.
On the last day, walking around the wooden floors in empty rooms, I remembered that first day so many years earlier. The empty rooms now seemed worn and friendly. We’d traveled together; we hated to part.
Network Answering Service, San Francisco, 1984: Way back in the day, many years ago, my wife Lori and I ran an answering service on Geary Boulevard in San Francisco, with hundreds of musicians, actors, small businesses and the like for our clients.
And one day, a young woman came to San Francisco from the East Coast, to make her fortune. Her name was Andrea Lewis.
She showed up, and we gave her work, and the in-house communication training we did, and she became more and more self-confident and took on more and more. At one point, when I was off on some dumb adventure, the whole place was run by three women: my wife, Andrea Lewis, and our manager Mara Kimmel. That round-the-clock staff of 30+ was just humming.
It was sometimes tough times. And it was some really good times.
A VOICE
Andrea Lewis had a voice. A helluva voice.
She got a lot of encouragement from us, and began to sing in gigs, and found a spot on the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. They won four grammies, and performed in Carnegie Hall.
POLITICAL
Alway political as all get out, sometimes she thought I was a warm and kind fellow, and other times she opined that I was a sexist, honky, capitalist pig.
And she’d tell me about it.
I liked her.
A VOICE ON THE AIR
Not long after the end of Network Answering Service, Andrea found her true home, as a co-host on popular San Francisco radio station KPFA, and she’s been a favorite voice on the air ever since.
On November 15, 2009, Andrea Lewis, age 52, died at home of a heart attack.
And I wish, from the bottom of my heart, that she was still on this planet to give me grief like back in those days gone by.
A MEMORIAL
Her parents came in to the San Francisco Bay Area from Florida, because KPFA arranged a memorial service in Oakland.
Some of the old crew from Network Answering Service, including me, went to attend, to remember her and to think back on those days.
THINKING BACK
This woman who had come to San Francisco from Detroit many years ago, and found a home in the community that had arisen around our answering service company on Geary Boulevard in San Francisco.
With us and our gang she got employment, friends, communication training and lots of encouragement.
She went on to become a much-loved radio talk show host on popular radio station KPFA, along with achieving some great results with her music.
WE DIDN’T KNOW
When Andrea died last week, suddenly and unexpected, we were all shocked to hear the news. You see, she seldom said much about herself and we didn’t know she was seriously ill, even though for others, she used her gift at interviewing them, both making them feel at home and also getting them to open up on some of the tough questions.
Here is what her friends at KPFA Radio had to say.
A MEMORIAL
The memorial service was amazing: Attending was the San Francisco Symphony Chorus, the local congresswoman, Barbara Lee of Oakland, made arrangements to read Andrea’s name into the Congressional Record, and notable speakers remembering her included a Poet Laureate of California, along with professors from Stanford and University of California praising her journalism and mourning her as a friend.
They played recordings of Andrea singing, blues and jazz. Her former jazz band played, and there was even a performance of dancing girls with huge drums. It was a heck of a send-off. The only one who would have enjoyed it even more, Andrea herself, was unable to attend. Or maybe she did.
On the huge wall above the stage in this large church, bigger than life, they showed a montage of photographs, including several dozen from our Network Answering Service days together. Eight of us Network folk had come, some for hundreds of miles, to be there. To say good bye and remember her.
The large church was so packed that many had to sit on the floor, along the walls, and stand in the lobby outside.
THANKSGIVING
And what does this tell us?
It tells us to cherish our friends.
It tells us .. not to let them slip away.
November celebrates Thanksgiving in the U.S., but there’s no reason it can’t be day of “thanks” everywhere in the world.
So I wanted to say “thank you” to all of you who have been a part of my life and times I’ve seen, down through all the years.
I just wanted to let you know I’m grateful.
Thank you for being here, on this planet, in these times.
