The Great Telephone Operators Strike of 1947

In April, 1947, the telephone operators of this country went on strike. Some 350,000 telephone operators, almost all of them women, walked off theirs jobs around the nation. For almost a month, there was no voice on the other end of the line asking "Number, please" to connect calls.

In the days before dial phones and dial tones, every number had to be spoken into the receiver and a human being - almost always female - connected your phone to the number you asked for. The strike brought telephone communications to a standstill. As the strikers vowed, "the voice with a smile" was indeed "gone for awhile."

The strike was short, lasting about a month. In retrospect, the strike, which was organized by the National Federation of Telephone Workers (NFTW) is remembered as ill-planned and without sufficient strength or money to keep the workers going. A.T. & T also caught the union off guard with its ability to restart and keep the phone systems operating despite the strike. The one great achievement was that it organized telephone workers to the point that they pressed for a reorganization of the NFTW, which was a collection of autonomous units, into a national union of telephone workers, the Communication Workers of America, that exists to this day.

I had never heard of this strike until a few months ago. I learned about it only then through a most unconventional source: a cartoon that my late father-in-law drew at the height of the strike.

In the spring of 1947, Arthur Hyer was living in Chicago and attending optometry school. He was also head over heels in love with Ellen Wilson, a young woman he had met two years earlier at Camp Story in Virginia while she was serving in the Red Cross and he was convalescing at a base hospital. The war-weary sergeant recovering from battle fatigue was smitten with the young, idealistic Ellen, who was about to ship out to England and had dreams of changing the world.

Before the war, Arthur had also had dreams, in his case of becoming an artist. Following the war, he returned to Ohio, his home state. Feeling he was too old to resume his art studies and knowing Ellen was from Evanston, Illinois, Arthur used the GI Bill to fund optometry school at the Northern Illinois College of Optometry. After carefully ascertaining that Ellen was not involved with anyone else, he began a cautious courtship of his wife-to-be while pursuing a degree in optometry.

When the telephone strike hit, it slowed but did not extinguish Arthur's wooing of Ellen. Despite his optometry studies, his hands and his heart had not forgotten how to express his feelings in an economy of line. Sometime during that month of limited telephone service, a cartoon made its way from 4170 Drexel on the south side of Chicago to 825 Reba Place in Evanston, lamenting the loss of phone service.

After the strike ended, Arthur continued his studies and his wooing, and in May of 1948, a year later, he married his Ellen in Evanston.

My late mother-in-law was a voracious saver. My husband, the oldest child in the family, tells me that her packrat proclivities drove his father to despair and, finally, resignation. Among her voluminous papers at her death in 2004, 5 weeks to the day after her husband of almost 56 years died, were photos, postcards, newspaper clippings (often multiples copies of the same one), menus from restaurants, old Christmas cards, and, folded carefully, a cartoon from her then future husband, drawn during the great telephone operators strike of 1947.