Multnomah County OR Archives Biographies.....Thatcher, J. H. 1849 - ************************************************ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://www.usgwarchives.net/or/orfiles.htm ************************************************ File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by: Ila L. Wakley iwakley@msn.com January 24, 2007, 11:27 pm Author: The S. J. Clarke Publishing Company J. H. THATCHER. Said Fred Lockley in the Oregon Journal of August 22, 1926: “J. H. Thatcher, general agent of the Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Company, is one of the pioneers in this line in Portland. In point of service, he is dean of them all, for he has been identified with the business for more than sixty years. When I interviewed Mr. Thatcher recently in his office, he said: “'I was born at Medina, New York, in 1849. My father, George H. Thatcher, was a hardware merchant. He was born in Connecticut. My mother’s name was Elizabeth Nixon. Her father was an Episcopal rector at Medina, New York. I attended school at Medina until I was ten years old and during vacations I worked in a grocery store. I had to get down at five o’clock in the morning to open the store and sweep out and I stayed until closing time at nine p. m. When I was ten our family moved to Albion, New York, where I attended school for a year. “'When I was eleven years old the postmaster hired me as a clerk in the post office. One of the reasons why he hired me was that he could get me for a very low salary, and also he didn’t want to come down at five a.m. to make up the outgoing mail. I was always on hand to get the mail off at five a. m. and as soon as the mail was dispatched I had no further duties until eight a. m. During this three-hour intermission I practiced on a key in the Western Union Telegraph Office, which was in the same building as the post office and separated from the post office by a rail only. In 1861, when I was twelve years old, J. D. Reid, superintendent of the Western Union Telegraph Company, came in on the early train from New York. I was practicing on the key. This was about seven-thirty a. m. He stood there and waited until the regular operator came down at eight o’clock. He said to the regular operator, “The boy sends pretty good Morse. You had better put him on the payroll, for he can attend to emergency messages from five to eight in the morning, also at night after you have gone home.” I was hired then and there at a salary of five dollars a month. “'That was sixty-five years ago and I have been connected with the telegraph or telephone industry ever since. The regular operator at Albion received the messages on a tape. In those days messages were not taken by ear. Before long I was taking messages by ear instead of depending on the tape. The first work I caught on the wire by ear was “you.” From Albion I was transferred to Rochester, New York, working under E. M. Barton, the chief operator. Later he was the founder and president of the Western Electric Company at Chicago. From Rochester I was transferred as operator successively to Schenectady, Oswego, Syracuse and Buffalo. In October, 1868, when I was nineteen years old, I left Rochester for New York city, from which city I sailed on October 28 for San Francisco. “'Before leaving the east I had secured a job with the Central Pacific Railroad Company, then under course of construction, and when I went to their office they sent me to the end of their track, which at that time was at Truckee, California. I served as a railroad operator as well as manager of the Western Union Telegraph Company. I stayed at Truckee until April, 1869, when I was transferred to the Western Union office at Sacramento, and soon afterward took part in the first strike ever indulged in by electrical workers. This strike started at Sacramento on Christmas day, 1870. This was long before the organization of labor unions. In 1869 some of the leading telegraph operators in New York conceived the idea of forming a Telegraphers League for mutual advancement and aid, morally, mentally and physically. Most of the operators joined the league. The object of the league was not to enforce any particular demands. In fact, we had the kindliest feeling for the Western Union Company. We all roomed in the office building which the company furnished us free of rent, so that we would be available for emergency duty. There were about fifteen of us. On Christmas morning the general superintendent from San Francisco came into the operating room and instructed the chief operator to turn down all instruments so that there would be absolute quiet while he talked. He asked if any of us belonged to the Telegraphers League. It so happened that all of us belonged to it and we said so. He said, “You will have to cut loose from it altogether and renounce your oath of membership or leave the company’s service.” We showed him a copy of the oath we had taken and told him that it was simply for mutual benefit and in no way designed to take advantage of the company. He told us we could resign at once or quit the service. All of us decided to quite the service. We took the old steamer Chrysopolis for San Francisco, where we joined the operators in that city, and there we rented headquarters. After staying in San Francisco for two weeks I decided to go back to my old home at Albion, New York, for a visit. “'I had a very interesting experience on this trip. While the train was at Laramie, Wyoming, I heard the telegraph instrument in the station saying that Cheyenne was on fire and nearly wasdestroyed. I said to my fellow passengers as we pulled out of Laramie, “As we come into Cheyenne you will see that the town is burning up. My fellow passengers were completely mystified, for they couldn’t understand how I could foresee an event of that kind. At the depot at Boone, Iowa, I heard a message going over the wire saying that the strike was settled. After visiting at home for a week or two I returned to San Francisco and in 1870 was appointed chief operator at Virginia City, Nevada. I spent about six years in that city and then asked for and secured a transfer to San Francisco. In 1877 I was made superintendent of Gold & Stock Telegraph Company, with headquarters in the Mining Stock Exchange in San Francisco. I saw some lively times there, for this was during the height of the Comstock lode excitement, when fortunes were made and lost in handling the stock of those fabulously rich mines. When I was filling the position of superintendent George S. Ladd was president of the American District Telegraph Company, which operated call boxes in San Francisco. He purchased the right to engage in the telephone business on the Pacific coast. John I. Sabin was his superintendent. Stephen Field, a nephew of Cyrus W. Field, who laid the first Atlantic cable, was employed to make a hundred coffin-shaped magneto telephones. Mr. Sabin and I had our homes connected, as I was interested in this new device, believing that it might have a future. In those days the way you managed was to talk into your telephone and then transfer it to your ear to get the reply. The switchboard was located at No. 222 Sansome street, in the office of the American District Telegraph Company. The lines were constructed over the buildings of the business district. The switchboard was of the Western Union Telegraph pattern. It had large heavy spring jacks with large able-bodied plugs inserted. You could not get central as we do today. The system then was to call for central on the American District Telephone call boxes. “'In December, 1879, I was offered and accepted a position as manager of the Western Union Telegraph Company at Portland, Oregon and arrived here on Christmas day. The office was at First and Ankeny streets. Directly off the telegraph operating room was a small room with a twelve-number section of telephone switchboard. The subscribers were on individual grounded wires, for in those days there was no such thing as an electric light or street railway circuit, consequently we were not disturbed by heavy current induction. With the coming of the electric light, we were nearly driven out of business, in fact we had to rebuild, using the metallic circuit. After we moved the telephone office to Second and Ankeny streets we got a single-cord board. Miss Drewery, later Mrs. Pierce, was our first chief operator, while Blanche Martin, now Mrs. King, was the night chief operator. Mina Smith, one of our early operators, thought she was doing extremely well when we concluded we could pay her twenty-five dollars a month. “'At first we had twelve subscribers, who produced no revenue, as the service was complimentary. The idea, of course, was to have them become enthusiastic about the service and induce their friends to install phones. Among our complimentary subscribers were William Wadhams; George Weidler; Dr. Plummer, the first manager of the telegraph company here; Allen & Lewis; Corbett & Macleay and several others. George Thomas, now deceased, was a check boy for the Western Union and became the first operator of the telephone company. We used to repeat all telegraph messages from San Francisco to Seattle here, for in those days the batteries were not strong enough to wire directly from San Francisco to Seattle. It was George’s job to transfer the messages from one hook to the other. Mr. Thomas went to work for us as a messenger boy. Later he served as a check boy and afterward became manager of the Western Union Company. In later life he was an insurance man and one of the warhorses of the democratic party. “'George S. Ladd leased this territory for telephone purposes to J. L. Atkinson and Seth Pope and I succeeded Mr. Pope as secretary-treasurer and superintendent. This was in 1882 and at that time we had one hundred and ninety subscribers, each of whom paid five dollars a month for the service, with an additional charge of five cents for each call. At that time it was a metered service. Naturally I was very anxious to increase the number of subscribers, but I had pretty hard sledding. “'One day I went to Olds & King’s store and had a talk with old man King and “Willie” Olds. I told them that we had over two hundred subscribers and I tried to show them how useful a telephone could be to them. They laughed at the idea of anyone calling them up to order goods. They said that if anyone wanted to buy they could come down and examine the goods – how could they see the stock over the telephone? Finally Mr. King said, “You mean well, Mr. Thatcher, but you are wasting your time. The telephone is a toy. Our store is a business institution. We have no time to waste during business hours, fooling with a telephone.” “Willie” Olds said, “Your telephone would cost us five dollars a month. By putting five dollars more with that we can hire a boy who will deliver all our messages and in addition he will sweep out the store and during rush hours help to take care of our customers.” I finally said, “If I were a betting man I would wager ten dollars that within a year you will want a telephone installed. They offered to bet me all the money I would bet that as long as they were in business they would never install a telephone. I worked very hard that first year and increased our list of subscribers until we had seven hundred customers. Finally “Willie” Olds sent a messenger boy to me saying they had decided to install a ‘phone. “'I am telling you my experience with Olds & King because it was typical of the arguments advanced by most of the other merchants. I had to stand more abuse, good-natured raillery, jeers and even insults that first year than I have had altogether since then, from Portland merchants and professional men who didn’t want to be bothered with what they felt would be a troublesome and annoying toy. As a matter of fact, it was a good deal of annoyance to the early subscribers. Judge Bellinger had a telephone over on the east side. Every time there was a fire anywhere within a half mile of his place at night time, the Oregonian would call him up and ask him to go out and see whose house or bar was burning, how it caught fire and how much damage was done. I lived at Second and Hall streets. I had to get up at all hours of the night to accommodate neighbors who wanted to call a doctor or to talk to some friends. In those days they considered it very unneighborly if a person having a telephone would not accommodate anyone within a dozen blocks who wanted to use it. “'I used to have considerable trouble with William Wadhams and Charles H. Dodd, as both of them believed in muscular Christianity. If the operator did not give them immediate and courteous service, it was up to the operator to take to the tall timber. One day I came in and found my boy operator lying in a corner of the room with his coat torn and when I asked him what was the matter he said, as well as he could for crying, “Mr. Dodd licked me.” I turned to Mr. Dodd, who stood there very red in the face and very indignant, and he said, “When I asked the boy for a number he was very impudent. He told me the line was busy, so I came down here and gave him a good thrashing to teach him better manners.” John McNichols, now auditor of the company at Los Angeles, and Pat Bacon, manager here in Portland, were both “central” boys, as they called the operators in those days. Young Odeneal, a nephew of J. N. Dolph, was one of our boy operators, as well as Jim Day, John Nauratil and Willie Hill. Charlie Stinger, now with the Southern Pacific, worked for me as a Western Union messenger boy. “'The stock of J. L. Atkinson and Seth Pope was acquired by W. B. King and Mr. Du Boise and they, together with Donald Macleay, C. H. Woodard and William Wadhams, were the owners of the Portland Telephone, Telegraph & Electric Light Company when I took Mr. Pope’s place as secretary and in 1890 this corporation was succeeded by the Oregon Telephone & Telegraph Company, of which I became secretary, treasurer and superintendent. Ten years later the business was taken over by the Pacific States Telephone & Telegraph Company. I was secretary and later became division superintendent. In 1906 the present corporation, the Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Company, succeeded the Pacific States Telephone & Telegraph Company and I was made superintendent of the Oregon division. In 1907 I was promoted to the position of general agent and am still on the job.'” An acknowledged authority on matters pertaining to the public utilities in which he has specialized, Mr. Thatcher has played well his part, giving his best efforts to every task that he has undertaken, and although nearly seventy-nine years of age, he is still an active factor in the world’s work. The Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Company is a part of the Bell system and has over eighty-seven thousand telephone subscribers in Portland. In half a century the telephone in America has grown from a crude instrument and a length of wire to more than eighteen million telephones, interconnected by sixty-one million miles of wire. It has grown from uncertain transmission between two rooms to easy and dependable service from village to village throughout our big cities and across the continent and between this continent and Great Britain. As an investment the telephone has grown from a subject of jest, when first introduced, to a three billion dollar business, the property of eight hundred thousand men and women, who are confident in its stability and earning power. It has grown from two men, the inventor and his assistant, to an army of three hundred and fifty thousand engaged in meeting the problems of construction, maintenance and operation. It has grown from a single sentence, barely intelligible, to a daily traffic of seventy-three million calls, each a message of value to some one. This growth is the measure of the people’s need for personal communication and of the activity, in only half a century, in meeting that need. In December, 1876, Mr. Thatcher married Miss Evelyn Charlotte Storror, who was born in Hamilton, in the province of Ontario, Canada, and passed away November 20, 1925. She had become the mother of four sons, all of whom were trained in the telephone business. They are: George W., president of the Inman-Poulsen Lumber Company; Leonard, who is connected with a blue print company of Portland; Guy, Pacific coast agent for the Williamsport Iron & Steel Company; and Ralph, who lives in Portland. Mr. Thatcher is a republican and manifests a deep interest in civic affairs but has never aspired to public office. Along fraternal lines he is a thirty-second degree Mason, and a member of the Benevolent Protective Order of Elks. He resides at the Arlington Club, one of the most exclusive in Portland, and has been identified with the organization since 1887. Mr. Thatcher was one of the early governors of the Commercial Club, which he also represented in the capacity of vice president. He is a member of Chapter No. 31 of the Telephone Pioneers of America, which was founded, in Portland, April 28, 1924. The national organization was formed November 2, 1911, by Henry W. Pope, Charles Truax and T. B. Doolittle and its first president was Theodore N. Vail. A tireless, conscientious and efficient worker, Mr. Thatcher has risen from a lowly position to a place of broad influence and usefulness, and his salient characteristics are those which inspire respect, admiration and friendship. Additional Comments: History of the Columbia River Valley from The Dalles to the Sea, Pages 183-187 File at: http://files.usgwarchives.net/or/multnomah/bios/thatcher291gbs.txt This file has been created by a form at http://www.genrecords.org/orfiles/ File size: 18.0 Kb