(Contributed by Robert Essenburg, a nephew of Gerrit Elzinga)
The year 1916 was an exciting one. That was the year our parents invested $25 for one share in the Borculo Independent Telephone Company. The company was assigned a territory approximately four miles in all directions from Borculo. The central’s office was located in one of the rooms of the secretary Ralph Lamar’s home in Borculo. One of the rules was that Sunday and night calls were to be made only in ‘case of emergency.” After the poles had been set and one wire attached to the poles, the lines were ready for the installation of the large wall phones.
On the day when the telephone installer came we marveled at the size of his large automobile, but we also wondered why he, several times, crawled under his car while on the road, until we were told that it was a chain driven car, and that the chain would often run off the sprockets, which stopped the car. Since our road no gravel surface, we felt that this poor fellow crawling around under the car in the dust had our sympathy.
We had as many as 18 families on our line and each had a different number. The number and length of the rings was made by means of a crank on the right side of the phone box. Left handed persons were thus discriminated against, it would seem? Every phone number being rung was heard by all of the subscribers on that line, so if a person was inquisitive about other families, all he would have to do is listen to the conversations. Our number was three long rings and one short ring. This was fine until Gerrit N Elzinga moved to a farm about one mile west from us. He was assigned the phone number of one short and three long rings. This confused some people who would ring our number when they wanted the other Gerrit. We might ask, “Which Gerrit do you want?” They might say “Gerrit N,” or they might say “Gerrit M.” Then they might say “The one by the town hall.” But one was a little west of the town hall and the other a little ease of the town hall. This confusion cleared up when, after a few years, the other Gerrit moved away.
As the years rolled by, this one wire phone system gradually deteriorated. Wires would break and so would the poles. The service rates were low, and at the annual stockholders meetings, the members were determined to keep them low. Shortly after the end of World War II, it became difficult to find people willing to serve on the board of directors. Also, an order had been received from the Public Service Commission that all calls including those made on Sunday and at night must be considered to be emergencies. Those were the days when I was placed in the unenviable position of being made president of the company. Henry Geerts of Borculo was made secretary. We developed the grand scheme of inviting the Bell Telephone to accept us as a gift. We drove to the Bell headquarters in Detroit and urged them to accept our generous offer. Naturally they refused our offer.
What compounded our problems was when the Rural Electrification Authority came into our rural area where Consumers Power Company was reluctant to come. The R.E.A. grounding system interfered with the phone’s one wire grounding system, so that there was a continuous loud buzz on the phone when the receiver was lifted.
A Mr. De Jong became interested in taking over the system. We engaged Attorney Wendell Miles (now Judge Miles) to take care of the legal matters connected with the dissolution of our corporation. He was a very genial adviser and always when leaving our board meetings would quip, “Well, I’ll be suing you.”
This Mr. De Jong did take over the telephone company and did modernize it, but later sold it. In 1985 this system ranks with the best, with nearly all transmission lines located underground. It is now called Central Telephone Company with the home office in Chesaning, Michigan
My parents (Louis and Jennie Van Den Berge) bought the phone company from what was basically a group of co-op owners in early 1953. They moved the family to Borculo from Kalamzoo. The new company was called the Ottawa Telephone Company.
In 1956 & 1957 the system was improved to a "modern dial system". Still had party lines but you now only got your own ring, no longer had to count the rings to see if it was your call or one for your neighbors and you could dial anywhere in Borculo without going through an operator. Before the switch to dial phones, the switchboard was in the front room of our house, directly across the street from the current phone building.
The business was sold by the Van Den Berges in 1967. The company sold a few more times over the next several years and the business eventually become part of the Century Telephone Group.
I have attached three pictures. One is of a stock certificate from what I would guess to be the original phone company in Borculo and is dated 1914. The second is a picture of a newspaper article from 1956 in the Zeeland Record about the improvements planned for the Ottawa Telephone Co. of Borculo. The other picture is of a phone that we have in our house. When dad pulled out all of the old "crank style" phones, he saved enough for each of us. The rest all went to the dump of course.
Hope you find this enjoyable. I am probably the member of the family with the best recollection of the phone business. (My wife Margaret & I have lived in Elk Rapids for the last 30 years.)
He says he thinks John Lamer ran it at first and they probably got a phone somewhere in the 1920's, he's not sure. He thinks Gerrit Essenburg installed the phone in the kitchen. It was a party line, of course, and our ring was 5 longs. However, everybody knew everbody else's ring sequence, so there was a lot of eaves dropping going on. Obviously, there were not too many secrets around the neighborhood. There was a time at night, he thinks maybe 9 o'clock when you could no longer make calls. I guess the operator went off duty. One of the last operators he remembers was Ella Scout.
The phones had batteries and it seems his family's were dead quite soon. His mom had 9 kids, but he and his brother were the only boys and came along late in life, so by the time they got the phone, most of the girls were gone. So, my grandmother's hobbies were listening to Amanda of Honeymoon Hill on the radio and listening to other people's conversations. It made other folks mad, but she wasn't the only one doing it. Once she got phone call warning her not to listen to other people's calls any more. My uncle Ben was 5 years older than my dad and and was a big teaser. He told his mom that they were going to come and take her to jail for listening on the phone. She was actually scared it was going to happen.
My dad says there were lots of complaints of poor service as time went on and they finally had a meeting about it where people vented their complaints. My dad says he was there and remembers some of what was said, but he doesn't want to name names, even now. I guess it was closed or sold after that some time.
When I was a boy I recall visiting my Aunt Ella Scout at the switchboard on the porch of Gerrit Talsma and then again on the porch of the Van Den Berges. There must have been other switchboard operators, but I haven't been able to identify them.
Also, I recall Gerrit R. Essenburg climbing the telephone poles as a lineman, and Bob Essenburg identified Nick Vander Slagt and Gerrit Gebben as being linemen as well.
Perhaps you caught this from reading the Zeeland Record article, but the changes made by Louis Van Den Berge included a six minute cutoff of a conversation. At the time I was dating my wife, Janet Van Asperen from Zeeland, and it was exasperating to have our conversations cut off every six minutes.
If you have a comment about your experience with the Borculo telephones, please email them to me at [email protected]. I can add them to this blog.