THE EAGLE, VERNONIA. ORE.
THURSDAY, AUGUST 1, 1946
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A FRANK STATEMENT
TO OUR SUBSCRIBERS
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Our reason for existence is to render telephone service to you, for your
business use and for your social convenience.
No one is better able than we
are to appreciate the fact that the quality of our srvice is of the utmost im­
portance to you and to the entire community.
Our objective, now as al­
ways, is to make your telephone service the best possible; that is vital to our
welfare as an operating telephone company.
like a pre-war basis; civilian telephone service was ruthlessly curtailed or
eliminated altogether, as it happened to suit the plans of those responsible
for war operations and war industries.
After V-J Day
In The Past
When the war ended, we all heaved a sigh of relief and looked forward to the early return of
normal conditions. We placed orders for new telephones and wire and switchboard equipment
and hoped for a let-down in the traffic load. So far from V-J day having brought us any relief,
our order for new equipment, except for a few driblets, have not been filled and our overloaded fa­
cilities and overworked personnel are called upon to handle an ever-increasing load.
.............. we have been justly proud of our service. It was fast and reliable.
Before the war our service in Vernonia was on a par with the best in any
comparable city in the United States.
Since 1939, all over the U. S. A., the number of long distance calls, both placed and actually
completed, has increased beyond the power of anyone to predict and beyond the power of any com­
pany to handle promptly with the personnel and equipment obtainable. At the same time, owing
to war conditions, it became vastly more difficult for our operators to put through and complete
the calls that were placed.
During The War
Then came Hitler’s mad rush into Poland in 1939. In common with every other civilian service,
the adequacy of our telephone service steadily declined for reasons quite beyond our power to alter.
Government regulations,' plus the common urge of patriotism demanded that we ehould serve the
needs of the army, the navy and associated war
industries first, at whatever sacrifice of conven­
ience to ourselves or to you. Our every resource in
money, equipment and manpower was thrown into
the effort to win the war. Ordinary civilian re­
quirements had to take second place.
At the same time there began a rapid dissipation
of our force of trained operators and technicians.
Many of the best of the people upon whom we
depended for operation and maintenance of our
plants left us. They went either into the armed
forces or into war industries with whose inflated
wage scales we could not compete, as our own
wage scales were held at fixed ceilings by the gov­
ernment.
This condition is improving, but we still have too
many comparatively new and inexperienced oper­
ators. Our standard of efficiency has naturally
declined despite the hardest and most nerve
wracking work by the small group of fully experi­
enced employees who have remained throughout
the war period.
With a progressively weakened force of oper­
ators, and no new equipment whatever, we handled
a rapidly mounting load of traffic everywhere in
our system. The figures speak for themselves:
In our Forest Grove district, which
includes Vernonia, 730,403 Long Dis­
tance calls were placed in 1939.
During 1945, there were 1,367,754
calls, an increase of 87.2 per cent.
During the war period, it was impossible to ob­
tain materials to meet this great increase in
civilian telephone service requirements; quite prop­
erly, the government imposed drastic limitations
upon supplies for other than military and war in­
dustry needs.
In other words, as the war-time load increased by leaps and bounds, our ability to cope with it
was taken from us, through no fault of our own. That condition, of course, was not confined to this
company; it was nation-wide, part of the price that we all had to pay to serve the army and navy
and win the war.
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FOR SIX YEARS OUR ENTIRE INDUSTRY FACED THESE CONDITIONS:
Vastly increasing demands By Army, Navy and Government.
Rapidly Mounting Civilian Demands for Ordinary Telephone Ser­
vice.
A Volume of Telephone Traffic Far Beyond Our Wildest Pre-War
Dreams.
Rapid and Progressive Depletion of our Force of Skilled Men and
Women, Technicians and Operators-
Inability to obtain equipment or Supplies to meet Civilian Require-
ments.
It is not surprising that our service to the public deteriorated during that
period'; on the contrary, we have every reason to be proud of our war rec­
ord, proud of the fact that despite the magnitude of our war effort we were
still able to serve the civilian public as well as we did. In every other coun­
try at war, little attempt was made to maintain telephone sei-vice at anything
The Tempo Is Not Salckening!
There Is No Let-Up!
DURING THE FIRST 5 MONTHS OF 1946. THERE WERE 637,486 LONG DISTANCE CALLS
IN THIS DISTRICT, AS COMPARED WITH 420,058 DURING THE FIRST 5 MONTHS OF
1943!
We have a waiting list of over 10,000 appli­
cants for telephone service, nearly 30 of them in
Vernonia. We want to serve them as soon aq we
can, if only for the obvious commercial reason that
our inability to serve them is costing us perhaps
$50,000 every month, over our entire system.
During the war period our installations of the
few telephones that have been available have been
regulated by government orders.
That condition
still holds. W. P. B„ Order U-2 dated September
27, 1946, sets out certain rules and schedules of
priority to which we are legally required to adhere.
Great pressure has been exerted by some people
who apparently felt that their needs should over­
ride the general good and the governmental regu­
lations. We have done our best however to allot
our available services regardless of personalities,
in accordance with the letter and the spirit of the
law. We believe these various regulations are in
the best interest of the most people; in any case,
they are the law to which we must conform.
But we cannot serve them until we obtain
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new
telephones, line materials, new switchboard facil-
¡ties, all the appliances that are essential to a big
increase in our service. The same reasons that are
holding up supplies of every sort all over the
United States, have made the manufacturers of tel-
ephone equipment unable to meet the tremendous
post-war demands of the industry. In short, the
war time conditions that impaired your telephone
service are still with us.
Supplies are trickling in slowly however ___
and
with a return to anything like normalcy in manu­
facturing conditions, the situation should improve
rapidly from now on.
In Vernonia
New telephones have been ordered and will be installed as soon as the
manufacturers can deliver them. Additional new line extensions will be
built as soon as materials can be procured.
You may rest assured that we are very much alive to the present
in-
adequacies and shortcomings of our service, which are common to telephone
service all over the United States at this time.
Until normal conditions return, we and our subscribers alike are the vic-
tims of conditions which are affecting practically every business and service
to some extent in the entire United States.
We hope that these conditions will not last much longer and we are de-
termined to restore the service to its former efficiency at the earliest possible
moment, Meanwhile, we ask you for your patience and reasonable consider-
ation.
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WEST COAST TELEPHONE COMPANY
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