WOMEN HAVE BEEN RULING PHONE LINES SINCE 1878.

Byline: DENNIS McCARTHY 

The rude teenage boys manning the first telephone switchboards are long gone. So are the roller-skating messenger girls helping the operators connect their calls.

But the job that Emma Nutt, the world's first female telephone operator, carved out for women in this country is still going strong 125 years later.

``Kids are still calling us for help with their homework or wanting to talk to Santa Claus,'' said Goldie Parazoo, a 25-year veteran operator in the SBC call center in Sherman Oaks.

Teenagers are still calling to ask, ``Is your refrigerator running? Well, you better go catch it.''

It's nice to know some things never change, isn't it?

``Sometimes it's people calling who just want to hear a real voice on the other end of the line, not a recording,'' says Tina Houston, who has been a telephone operator for 14 years.

``They may just want to talk things out, and know there's somebody to talk to here - 24 hours a day, 365 days a year,'' she said.

Technology may have changed how Emma Nutt did her job back in 1878 - two years after Alexander Graham Bell made the first phone call.

Goldie Parazoo and Tina Houston don't have to switch those calls by hand, as Emma did. And they don't need messenger girls to take a number and roller-skate over to the directory desk for them to save time.

Technology changed that. But one thing it couldn't change is the customers. They're still calling Goldie and Tina, as their ancestors called Emma, because the telephone operator is the one with all the answers.

Today, the job is still dominated by women, even though men started getting back in the business in the 1970s. It took them decades to get another shot at the job.

When commercial telephone exchange service began in New Haven, Conn., in January 1878 with 21 customers, teenage boys were hired to place the calls and repair faulty equipment, according to the SBC Archives and History Center.

``However, the young men on the switchboards were generally considered to be noisy, impatient and rude to the customers. This negative perception of male operators existed all over the country,'' the archive says.

``They were considered not old enough to be talked to like men, not young enough to be spanked like children.''

Enter Emma Nutt. She was hired to work the night shift on Sept. 1, 1878, in the Boston telephone exchange.

``Customers were so pleased by Emma's soothing, cultured voice that the rough shouts of all the boy operators were gradually replaced by more and more women's voices.

``After just seven years, all the telephone operators in Boston were women. This trend soon became nationwide. Male operators didn't begin to filter back into the Bell System until the 1970s.''

Right around the time Goldie Parazoo's mother was giving her 20-year-old daughter a piece of advice mothers all over this country had been handing out to their daughters for decades.

Get on with the phone company. It's a steady job, a good job. They're always going to need telephone operators. A live voice.

``That's what my mother told me, and a lot of mothers told their daughters,'' Goldie said Friday, laughing. ``Get on with the phone company. And you know something? She was right.''

Sure, there's been a decline in the number of operators since 1975, when technology started kicking in. And the job can be pretty cut and dried, finding telephone numbers for people.

But there are days when you go home feeling like a million bucks after tackling big problems and small requests, the women say.

Days like Tina had a few years ago when a man called 411 to tell her he was about to commit suicide. Tell me why, she asked, at the same time alerting her supervisor.

She kept him on the line for more than 15 minutes, calming and talking him down until she heard the knock on his door. The police had arrived to help him.

Only a live voice, a human voice on the other end of the customer's line could do that.

Only a live voice can tell a little girl calling 411 to hang on for a second, and she'll try to locate Santa Claus for her. Sorry, honey, he's not home right now, but why don't you write him a letter? Here's his address from the post office.

Try coming up with a recording to do that.

Yeah, a lot has changed since Emma Nutt replaced those rude teenage boys on the first telephone switchboard 125 years ago.

And a lot hasn't.

Dennis McCarthy, [phone]

dennis.mccarthy(at)dailynews.com

CAPTION(S):

3 photos

Photo:

(1) A woman works for the phone company in the 1880s, following the lead of pioneering operator Emma Nutt.

SBC Archives

(2 -- 3) Though technology has revolutionized phone service, customers still sometimes need to hear a human voice on the line. Above, The SBC call center's Tina Houston, left, and Goldie Parazoo don headsets to handle callers today, as did this pair of operators back in 1936 in photo at left.

Tina Burch/Staff Photographer

SBC Archives