Party Lines, Crank Phones, Hello Girls, and Other Terms We No Longer Use

John Hmurovic
August 2026

Telephones came to Whiting in 1895, when Dr. William Burton, superintendent of the Standard Oil Whiting Refinery had one installed in his house. It gave him the ability to keep in touch with his workplace, where 18 phones were already in use.

The second phone in Whiting was in the office of Dr. A.W. Street. Not much is known about Dr. Street or whom he called in a town where he could only connect with Dr. Burton and the refinery. But he was an adventurer. Just one year after his phone was installed, he left his medical practice, gathered a team of friends, and headed off for the Klondike Gold Rush in Alaska. Best guess is that he handed in his phone before leaving town, reducing Whiting to just one phone outside the refinery. No word on whether he struck it rich.

Tony Borgo told Whiting’s telephone history well in his article, The Telephone Comes to Whiting. But for current generations, who can’t imagine a phone that doesn’t send a text or take a selfie, what would your telephone life be like if you had lived in Whiting-Robertsdale at an earlier time? 

Pay Stations, Crank Phones, Switchboards, and Party Lines

With a small population, Whiting was to the phone companies of the late 1800s, no place to strike it rich. (Dr. Street certainly recognized there were better places for that). The Chicago Telephone Company was reluctant to install home phones here. Its first offer was to put in a pay station: a place, often a bank or a pharmacy, where people could make calls and pay the storekeeper for each one. The City of Whiting said no to that offer. The city wanted phone service for its residents. In 1895 the phone company gave in and agreed to install Whiting’s first telephone poles and hook up the city for phone service.    

Once Whiting residents could get telephones in their homes, using one was nothing like picking up the phone today. Anyone who wanted a phone had one choice: a “crank phone.” Those wall-mounted monsters could stand two feet tall, stretch a foot wide, stick a foot from the wall, and weigh up to thirty pounds.   

On the front was a transmitter, or microphone, adjustable for callers of different heights. You had to stand in front of it to talk, sometimes on a stool. A separate receiver hung from a hook on the left side of the cabinet and stayed attached by a cord, limiting how far you could wander.  

On the right side of the cabinet was the crank. To make a call, you turned it. That sent an electric signal from the phone’s battery, over telephone wires, and into the local telephone exchange.

Whiting’s earliest telephone exchange operated from the backroom of the Whiting Drug Company, at what is now 1542 119th Street. When your signal reached that room, it went to a switchboard and caused a small shutter to drop. An operator, probably a woman, saw the shutter move and noted the number beside it: your phone number.

The operator plugged a cord into your socket on the switchboard and said, “Hello. Number, please.” You told her the number you wanted to reach, and she connected the other end of the cord to that person’s line.

Simple, right?

If you wanted things more complicated, you could ask for a “party line.” The appeal was cost. The drawback was sharing the line with your neighbors.  

A party line might serve three to ten people. To make a call, you first picked up the receiver to see whether the line was free. If it wasn’t, polite people hung up and waited. Snoopy people stayed quiet and listened. They were called “rubberneckers,” and they could get away with it unless their dog barked or their kids screamed in the background. 

A good party line user also knew not to hog the line. Calls were supposed to last five to ten minutes. If someone overstayed, you could interrupt and complain. Or you could invent an emergency to move them along. That was against the rules, but sometimes it worked.   

Party lines did have one advantage in the crank phone era. If someone on your line was family or a friend, you could call them without an operator by turning the crank in a pattern of long and short rings. Everyone on the party line heard the rings, but only the person with that pattern was supposed to answer.

Up until 1911, every Whiting phone number had three digits. That caused problems on party lines where four or more households shared the same number. The operator still needed to know which person on that line should get the call. In 1911 letters were added to party line phone numbers to solve that problem. Your number might be 123-J, while another on the same line might be 123-K.

Technology kept moving. In the early 1900s, candlestick phones replaced bulky, wall-mounted, crank phones. They stood upright, like candlesticks, but attached to a desk of table. You still had to stay close when speaking, but to listen you could wander as far as the three-foot cord on the receiver allowed.

Before 9-1-1 & Free Calls to Hammond

What happened if you had a real emergency, not just one invented to clear a party line? There was no 9-1-1 yet; that didn’t arrive until 1979. If you had a telephone, you could call the police or fire department. But in 1913, with only 400 phones in town, most people had to run to the nearest emergency alarm box.

In 1913, Whiting signed a new contract with the Chicago Telephone Company requiring emergency alarm boxes throughout the city. Mounted on telephone poles, each box had a handle inside. Pulling it sent a signal to the fire department, which hitched its horses and headed out. Firefighters knew the neighborhood from the box number, then looked for smoke or for someone signaling them to the right location.  

The police used pole-mounted telephone call boxes before two-way radio. Foot patrolmen had to call the desk sergeant from assigned boxes at set times, so the desk knew where each officer was when an emergency call came in.

The Chicago Telephone Company installed the emergency system for free, but it was less generous with long-distance calls. In 1915, calling Hammond or East Chicago cost ten cents for the first three minutes, plus more for each extra minute. That was a lot of money from a 1915 change purse.  

That year, Hammond City Councilman Patrick Reilly led an effort to convince the phone company to cut the rate for calls between Hammond, East Chicago, and Whiting. “One can telephone all over the city of Chicago for a nickel,” Reilly argued. Comparing the cost to streetcar rides, he said no one objected to paying a nickel for a streetcar ride, “but we would protest against a ten-cent fare.” He concluded, “It’s worth five cents to telephone these places, but not a dime.”

What Reilly and others really wanted were free calls between Hammond, East Chicago, and Whiting. The company warned that free long-distance calls would lead to too many “trivial calls” and overwhelm the system. To avoid that, it compromised and cut the rate from ten cents to five.

Hello Girls

Operators were the key to the system. If you had a phone in Whiting before 1960, every call you made went through one. In the early days, operators were commonly called “hello girls” because they answered with “Hello.” The term was widely used in the World War One era. Even some U.S. census entries of the time, when listing occupations, might not list someone as a telephone operator, but as a “Hello Girl.”

The job became a female occupation, but it didn’t start that way. Young men were first hired in the telephone’s early years, but some were rude to callers. Women proved more polite and efficient, so by the time phones came to Whiting, most - if not all - local operators were women.

The work required dexterity, concentration, a good memory, and quick hands. Operators handled several calls at once, found the right switchboard sockets quickly, and stayed calm under pressure, especially during emergencies. They were the 9-1-1 of their time. They had to keep their cool and concentrate, even while managing the occasional rude or angry customer.

Operators were trained to use set phrases and speak clearly. You might hear “Number, please?” or “One moment please.” They said numbers with exaggerated clarity to make sure the phone number was correct. If you called from a pay phone, a well-trained operator could even tell the difference between the drop of a nickel, dime, or quarter just by the sound it made dropping into the box.

Testing the Operators

All of that training, memory, and calm under pressure mattered most when Whiting faced its biggest danger. At no time were the skills of Whiting’s operators tested more than on August 27, 1955. Only two operators were on duty at 6:12 that morning, when a massive explosion at the Standard Oil Refinery rocked Whiting and neighboring communities.

The refinery had its own switchboard. The blast not only put it out of service, it also shut down 12,000 phones in Whiting, Robertsdale, and East Chicago. Illinois Bell rushed 100 repairmen into the area. They quickly erected new poles and strung new wire, some within yards of the raging inferno that followed the explosion inside the refinery.

The two operators on duty quickly got help. Within a half-hour, all twenty-five stations at the Whiting switchboard were in use as operators rushed to the office on their Saturday morning. Operators from East Chicago showed up to help.

Not everyone lost telephone service, but almost everyone picked up a phone to check on relatives, friends, and what was happening. An estimated 45,000 phone calls came through the Whiting switchboard in the first twelve hours of what became a nine-day fire emergency.  

The 1955 explosion was a high point for Whiting telephone operators. Under intense pressure, they connected callers from across the country who wanted news of loved ones in Whiting.  Within five years, though, technology began phasing out their jobs.

Bye-Bye to Hello Girls

The explosion showed how essential operators still were in 1955, but within five years that familiar voice on the line would begin to disappear.  

Years earlier, in 1920, the Chicago Telephone Company had merged into a bigger company. Whiting’s new phone company was Illinois Bell. In 1960, Illinois Bell constructed a new building in Whiting. Ground was broken for the project on October 2, 1959. It was located at 1861 Indianapolis Boulevard.

Inside that building was the newest telephone technology. It would significantly change the way you used your phone. The big change was the introduction of direct dial service. Whiting callers could now reach 60 million phone users in the United States in Canada by dialing them directly. No operator was needed. Instead of “Number, please,” when you picked up your phone, you would hear a dial tone.  

In just a few years, 1963, the postal service would unite Whiting-Robertsdale residents by giving everyone in the community a zip code of 46394. In 1960, the phone company did the same thing by giving every local resident the telephone exchange of 659.

The technological changes eventually eliminated nearly all the remaining “hello girls.” Just as technology did with crank phones, candlestick phones, and the colorful princess phones of the 1960s. Pay phones once stood throughout Whiting, especially at gas stations, but by 1994 only three remained. Party lines disappeared locally in the 1960s; the last one in the United States was shut down in 2001.

Today, we take phones for granted. They are in our pockets, in our hands, or sitting on a table somewhere at home. Like electricity and water, we expect a phone to be there for us. It wasn’t always that way.