Flower in the River: A Family Tale Finally Told

She Stayed on the Line: From the Eastland Disaster to the Front Lines of France

• Natalie Zett • Season 4 • Episode 139

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Sirens, floodwater, shattering glass, and a calm voice saying, “Just a moment, please.” We revisit the women who turned raw noise into order—telephone operators whose steady hands and quick minds kept cities connected and, in wartime, helped save lives on the front lines.

We start in Chicago with the Eastland disaster and widen the lens to the “Hello Girls,” the Signal Corps Female Telephone Operators Unit. These bilingual women carried commands across the trenches, cut confusion to seconds, and worked under fire in wooden barracks —yet they weren’t officially recognized as veterans until 1977 thanks to President Jimmy Carter. Along the way, we read from the 1920 Green Book magazine feature that captured the role’s grit and grace: 

  • a chief operator swept away in a New Mexico flood after clearing her crew, 
  • a Chicago operator who kept cool as glass rained down after a bombing, and 
  • Texas teams who reported to flooded exchanges in bathing suits because the calls couldn’t wait.

We also talk ethics and craft: The operator who ran the Peace Conference switchboard and never “listened in,” is a reminder that power over the line demands restraint. Inside smaller exchanges, chiefs balanced training, staffing, reports, and the daily diplomacy of customer tempers. And we honor one whose skill modernized boards during the 1893 World’s Fair and whose name graced a rest home for operators.

This is a story about communication as a social contract. Before automation, the network had a heartbeat, and it belonged to women who treated urgency with poise and turned chaos into connection. If the history of technology often centers machines, these voices remind us that trust is the first infrastructure.

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Natalie Zett:

Hello, I'm Natalie Zett, and welcome to Flower in the River. This podcast, inspired by my book of the same name, explores the 1915 Eastland disaster in Chicago and its enduring impact, particularly on my family's history. We'll explore the intertwining narratives of others impacted by this tragedy as well. And we'll dive into writing and genealogy and uncover the surprising supernatural elements that surface in family history research. Come along with me on this journey of discovery. Hey, this is Natalie, and welcome to episode 139 of Flower in the River. I hope you're doing well. Two years ago, when I first began reporting on the people of the Eastland disaster, that is, the people beyond my family, one of them was Margaret Condon, a Western electric switchboard operator who stayed at her post for 34 straight hours after the Eastland capsized. And if you listened to that earlier episode, a switchboard operator and a nurse walk into a shipwreck, you already know some of these stories, and they echo beyond their moment in time, and I want to keep those alive. At the time when I did that podcast on Margaret Condon, I didn't quite understand how her story fit into a much larger one. The rise of women whose work at the switchboard helped wire and connect the modern world. This piece looks back at those hello girls, what they represented, and how their mastery of communication and endurance linked a generation of women from Chicago to Texas to all over the United States and eventually to the front lines of France. Now, even though the hello girls and the telephone girls, the term is often used interchangeably, the hello girls were something very specific and very special. They comprised about 220 bilingual women who served in World War One, officially known as the Signal Corps Female Telephone Operators Unit. They connected calls on the front lines, linking generals to troops and coordinating critical operations, often under fire. They wore uniforms, followed orders, served with distinction, but weren't officially recognized as veterans until 1977. So, as I mentioned, the term hello girls soon became shorthand for all the women who worked in the nation's switchboards, the telephone girls who kept families, businesses, and entire communities connected long before automation. I'm sharing a story about them, not only because it highlights their courage during the Eastland disaster, but because it helps us see who these women were in the times they lived. 1920 was also the year women in America won the right to vote, a moment when voices that had been confined to the switchboard were finally being heard throughout the nation. I'm going to be reading the Green Book magazine, which was published in Chicago. The date is November 1920. The heading on the magazine cover says Women in Business Life. There are four photos on the facing page here. One is of Mrs. Frederick Dewhurst, the Hello Mother of Chicago, Margaret Mackin, world's best telephone operator, Blanche Prather, or Prather, the flood heroine of Texas, and Maria Flood, the girl who didn't listen in. John Smith lay comfortably snoozing in his comfortable bed one cold winter night when suddenly came the jarring jangle of the telephone bell. John hated to get up and answer that call. The telephone was in the hall. It was cold. John was only half awake. Who the deuce wanted him at that hour? John turned over and buried his head in the bedclothes, hoping that the insistent clangor would be stilled by the echoes of Slumberland. The faithful night operator, whose duty it was to get John to that telephone, if it was humanly possible, rang again and again. And at last John had to rise and stumble to the hall, knocking his shins against all the furniture and saying very impolite things about the man who invented the telephone. Mrs. John Smith had just started her baking one Saturday morning, and the eggs for John's favorite cake had reached the point in the process of beating where they must not be left for an instant. Again, the hateful telephone bell, the persistent, pestiferous, perturbing tin tin abolition, which would not wait a second, eggs or no eggs. Mrs. Smith had to sacrifice the work on the eggs and answer that stubborn summons, only to find perhaps that it was nothing important at all for which the central operator had been asked to plug in. It was a common experience. Who has not, when reclining blissfully in a warm bath, been rudely disturbed by the telephone bell? And the hateful consciousness that there is no one to answer it but oneself. No one can guess what delightful tidings wait for you at the end of the wire. No mere subscriber can tell on what great tragedy or shrieking comedy, life's curtain, may rise to in this modern prompter's bell. And herein lies the romance of the telephone girl's job, the most romantic job in the world. Someone may try to tell you that the speed of the present-day telephone business has destroyed that romance. But just as some of the girls who work at the big city exchanges, they have the most exciting things to relate. The telephone girls have their fingers on the pulse of the world. They have perhaps the biggest opportunities for individual service of any group of young women in existence. They can be of use in the big affairs of the biggest businesses, and they can plug into the most delicate and intricate affairs of the heart. International loans and the fate of nations have depended upon the quick and efficient surface of some little girl sitting before a switchboard attending to her job. Dear Mabel's happiness may be eternally wrecked if the girl at the switchboard does not help Jack to communicate to Mabel at precisely the right moment the information that he quote end quote really do. The telephone girls have taken part in some of the most romantic, most daring, and dashing enterprises in modern history. And one could fill a book with tales of their heroism. There's no mere until jobs entered into with the idea that they will do until Billy or Jim or Tom comes along with the offer of another kind of job. Even if Billy and Jim and Tom do come, the telephone girls are hard to win away from their positions and they frequently return after marriage to the switchboards and the fascinating lines with which they drive ahead the business and the pleasure of the world. In Japan, when the subscriber rings up the exchange, it goes something like this. This is rather different from our curt American busy signal given by the girl at the B board, who never talks to subscribers at all, but who connects you with the trunk line you want to reach through the medium of the A girl and her number please. Number please. Thank you. They have to be brief, these American telephone girls with their hundreds of calls every day and their winking switchboards whose red eyes are constantly on them. There are only a certain number of lines that one girl can handle, and yet, on a busy exchange that has not been able to get any new equipment since the war, the red lights will burn and keep on burning when all the plugs are in the jacks. And it is then that the diplomacy and tact must come into play to handle the irate and often ignorant subscriber who has had to wait for his number. Quote, that's why they're girls, these telephone operators, says Mrs. Frederick Dewhurst, who has charge of the welfare work for the Chicago Telephone Girls. Quote, the company tried boys once, and once only. It was discovered that the boys were making engagements with some of the men subscribers to meet them in an alley after business hours and settle their scores with their fists. The girls are polite and patient, quick-witted and sympathetic, and loyal as the day is long. That's why they're girls. End quote. Loyal as the day is long. Yes, and sometimes their day is very long indeed. Far beyond the regulation eight or ten hours when a big public catastrophe causes the switchboards to blaze with lights after the normal traffic is over. Sometimes these girls, whom we so impatiently abuse, lay down their lives for us and the honor of the job. Such a case was Mrs. Sarah Rook, chief operator at Folsom, New Mexico, who was carried away by a flood a year ago. Ah, yes, we say, a heroine. Splendid thing to do. Stuck to her post until the last. Went down with the ship. Three cheers for Mrs. Rook. And then we go on our busy way, and when the next telephone operator is a little slow in getting our number, we impatiently jerk her up with, What's the matter there? Gone to sleep or some other pleasantry? There has been talk at various times of a new kind of telephone by which the subscriber can not only hear the voice of the person with whom he wishes to communicate, but can also look upon his face. Suppose such a thing were possible. Suppose, too, that we were able by some electrical device to see what the operator is doing at the switchboard. Suppose we had been able to look into that little exchange at Falsome, New Mexico, presided over by Sarah Rook. It is dark there. The wind howls around the building and the rain beats upon the windows. Outside, the river, swollen with days of heavy downpour, rushes on its devastating way, spreading over the country and sweeping along with it trees, houses, barns, and livestock, undermining telephone poles and coming ever nearer to the little room where the chief operator sits alone at the switchboard, plugging in. Her hair is disordered. Her face is white, but the slender hands which pick up the plugs are steady and her voice is clear. She is the captain of the sinking ship. The flood has come faster than anyone dreamed it would. The other operators, the crew, have been cared for. The captain saw to that, and when they wanted to stay with her, she told them sternly to do as they were bid. She would come too, she assured them, as soon as she had warned a few more of their danger. It would be all right. And so she stays there at the switchboard. This little woman stays until the water begins to come in at the door of the exchange, till it forces the door and sweeps everything before it. They found her a few days later lying near some reeds by the edge of the river. Here is another picture which you might have seen had you been able to look through the mouthpiece of your telephone when you called a certain number in Chicago's Loop District in early fall 1918. The switchboard was in the office of the British Recruiting Mission, just across the street from the Chicago Post Office. I myself happened to be in the vicinity, so I didn't need any patent device to help me picture the bravery of the telephone operator. You may remember that it was just about this time when an inspired madman decided that some of us had lived long enough in the vicinity of the federal building and tried to blow a few hundred of us to bits. As a newspaper representative, of course, I was on the spot when the bomb went off, and I rushed into the mission to telephone to my city editor. The infernal machine had shaken every building near it, and the whole front window of the mission was blown out. Glass was falling everywhere, and no one knew when another bomb might explode. A recruiting officer had a squad of rookies in hand, and the poor things, though standing as straight as they could, looked scared to death. We were all scared. Several people had been killed. The Adams Street of the post office was crumbling. Ambulances were dashing up to the scene. Policemen and soldiers began to arrive. The only cool person I saw was the girl at the switchboard. Quote, just a moment, please, she would say and go on with her work, trying to handle the calls which came in so fast that her hands fairly flew over the board. She would give an involuntary shudder when another pane of glass would go crashing down, and her voice was pitched higher to carry above the noise. That was all. She was polite, cool, efficient. Darn it all. How do they get that way? questioned a young officer off duty as he looked at her. Do you know that girl only gave a little bit of a scream when the bomb went off? Then she settled right back at the board, and she sticks to it. There's nerve for you. They are loyal, these girls. We have had proof of it time and again. A big fire breaks out in some theater just at the close of the performance. You think your daughter is in that audience. You hope that she may have gone somewhere else, but you are not sure. You must find out at once if she is safe. The streetcars are too slow. You and hundreds of others like you rush to the telephones, and the girls of the first night shift, just removing their sets for the rest period, put them on again, turn back, and work uncomplainingly with the second group boards to relieve the suspense of anxious relatives and friends. Late in the afternoon of a dull day, a dirigible carrying passengers catches fire mid-air and plunging downward a thousand feet crashes through the road of a well-known bank in the heart of the city, causing a big explosion and the loss of many lives. There is no time to think of being tired. The switchboards are alive with questions which must be answered for humanity's sake, and the telephone girls remain at their posts. Quote, I have seen our girls working with all their might while the tears streamed down their cheeks, one of the old operators told me. It was at the time of the Eastland disaster. And maybe we weren't busy that day. Lots of girls had relatives on the boat, and they were just wild with anxiety, of course. But did they desert their posts? Not a bit of it. They stuck, and it was a good thing they did, for everyone in the world wanted us that day. The newspapers calling up the forty-fifth cousins of everyone who had been on the boat and trying to get pictures, the relatives all phoning each other, and the public in general keeping us jumping. It was the same thing on Armistice Day, only then the girls cried tears of joy, and we thought we'd never be able to get them to take any rest. They were so excited that they wanted to catch every single call that came in. You have thought that General Pershing himself was at the end of every wire. The telephone girls had the right to glory in the victory won. Did they not have a glorious share in the winning? It was said early in the war that the American women were not wanted overseas with the American army. Then somebody persuaded somebody else that the war could not be won without the telephone girls. And so, well, in June and July of 1918, when Paris was threatened by the enemy, our own American boys were massed in thousands between the French capital and the German guns. It was a corps of American telephone girls, 60 of them working at the switchboards, who helped save the city and to win the second battle of the Marne. General Gallieni's army of taxicabs, which saved Paris in the first Marne fight, can have no greater credit than these slim young members of the United States Signal Corps. They knew things, those Signal Corps girls that all the world wanted to know and couldn't. Those girls with the American army northwest of Vardun knew things. When in October before the armistice, they won the admiration of the whole world by remaining at their posts in burning wooden barracks until ordered to quit. Their names will go down in history to the everlasting glory of the American girl. Maria Flood of Chicago. Then there were the two girls who had charge of the palace switchboard during President Wilson's visit to Paris. They must have had some interesting experiences upon which they will, of course, be forever discreetly silent. Then there was the girl who never listened in, Maria Flood of Chicago, who had charge of the Peace Conference switchboard for the president. A reporter said to Miss Flood when she came back and was being interviewed in New York, I suppose you knew everything that went on over the wire regarding the Peace Conference. Miss Flood replied, No, I never listened in once. And wasn't I glad to be able to cross my heart on it, she wrote afterwards to friends. You see, we were on our honor. It didn't need a war, however, to bring out the courage and the devotion of the telephone operators. In strikes, riots, and disasters of all kinds, they have proved what girls can do who are interested in their jobs, and who work conscientiously and fearlessly. Perhaps the most striking instance is that of the Texas operators in the November floods at Corpus Christi, Galveston, Port Orances, and other seaports where the enraged waters piled up scores of dead and would have added many more had it not been for the dauntless courage of these girls. Their own homes were flooded, many of them, and yet, instead of seeking safety for themselves, they stood by to relieve at the call of human suffering. Service was their slogan, and they served. They left their flooded homes and went to work in bathing suits at flooded exchanges. Mrs. Blanche Prather, like Mrs. Sarah Rook, stuck to her post until the central office at Port Arancis began to go down. She fared better than Mrs. Rook. She was rescued just in time, but her heroism was equally great. The Corpus Christi's operators defied the flood and storm, which, near the city park, tossed the telephone poles about as if they had been straws and carried ships into the backyards of private residences. Galveston operators who have seen many floods all stuck to their posts and maintained service in the face of the greatest danger. Nor would anyone else who considers for a moment the service these girls have rendered. Why should we get out of patience with them? Do we really know anything about their work? Here are a few sidelights given by Miss Lucille Roberts of Norman, Oklahoma, who is chief operator in one of the exchanges of that town and who writes in the Southwestern telephone news on the exquisite pleasures of being a CO chief operator. I do not believe folks realize, she says, the thousand and one things a chief operator has to do anyway, especially a chief operator in the medium-sized towns which are large enough to require a lot of attention, but not large enough to have all the work specialized. First, she has to see that the force is kept up and well trained, usually doing the training herself. On days when they are short, she has to rearrange the schedule of work, change somebody here and another person there, and spread them all out to cover as much space as possible. In the meantime, smoothing Madge's ruffled feathers because she didn't get as good hours as Susie did, and appeasing Matilda, who didn't want to sit on that position at all. She wanted the one Alice had, at the same time, trying to get a different headset for Sarah, who complains that hers hurts. The chief operator, too, has a great deal of the clerical work to do on a small exchange. And there are always several reports, several special reports that just have to go in. Part of the supervising falls to her lot, including answering information, troubled apartment, and public toll, and so it goes. Finally, the last job is finished. Fourteen hours of work have been crowded into eight or nine, and she is happy, feeling of work well done. But that night, just as she is drifting into dreamland, an awful thought brings her wide awake. Horrors! Here is the day gone, and I didn't get a single toll timing test the district chief asked for. So, you see, we play a varied role. But after all, we love our work, and we wouldn't trade places with the best of you. Our trials are forgotten, and the world wears a rosy hue when some subscriber calls in. And says, I want to thank you, Miss C.O., for the excellent service I got on such and such a call. That was the best service I ever got. Oh my. This is bliss. Unlike Miss Flood, who never listened in, I did listen in. Once at a luncheon where a table full of old telephone operators were reminiscing. Dear old girls, most of them with white hair. Yes, said one, a pleasant-looking woman past 50, I have been with the telephone service for nearly 30 years. When I came to Chicago, there were only seven exchanges. Now they have thirty, not including the suburban ones. Times have changed, but the old spirit still exists. The spirit of service and the thrill of the work. Things happen all the time on a big city exchange when you see that little red light burning and you answer its call, and there's no one talking on the other end. Well, it may only be some careless person who has left the receiver off the hook, but it might be, and it has known to be a mute call for help from some helpless woman who is overpowered before she can make any other effort to call for assistance. The signal shows that something is wrong, and a quick-witted operator has been known to save a life by quick action. Yes, there's still romance in it, and the adventure, and a lot of fun, too. They told then of Maggie Mackin, the best telephone operator in the world, retired now on a pension and married to one of the officials of the Bell Telephone Company. She was an operator for 33 years. We always had the habit of putting up the hardest jobs to Maggie Mackin, one of the Chicago telephone heads, has said, if our machine began to creak at any part, she knew intuitively just where to inject the lubrication. It was Miss Mackin who helped make a success of a new kind of switchboard adopted by the company during the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. And so, when the officials decided to provide a good rest home and vacation camp for the telephone girls, they thought of the best one they had ever had, and they named the place Margaret Mackin Hall. Miss Mackin, or Mrs. Hyatt as she is now, went out to the dedication and laid the cornerstone for the home which is situated in beautiful grounds at Warren's, Illinois. A short ride from Chicago, there is a large portrait of the best telephone operator over the mantel in the living room. Isn't it worth while doing your job so well that you're known as the best? Subscribers may be crusty, but honors do come at the end, and I've got a couple of things. This put Margaret in context. There was an entire movement happening amongst these women who were working in the hot new technology of being telephone operators. Terminology, I know it got confusing. Fast forward to World War I, this group of women who were telephone operators who were sent over to France, I'm not sure if they worked elsewhere, but they were in France. They were called the Signal Corps, that was their official name. They were also sometimes known as the telephone girls or telephone operator girls, or some variation. And of course, hello girls became the catchphrase for all women telephone operators in the early 20th century. So the Green Book magazine, which is where this article appeared, was a popular American monthly published from 1909 to 1921, so this is a year before it ceased publication. And it was published by the Story Press Corporation in Chicago, and it was part of a trio. They had the Red Book, the Blue Book, and the Green Book, often referred to collectively as the Book Magazines. Each had its own flavor, with the Green Book leaning more towards society, travel, and human interest storytelling than the pulpier adventure tales of its siblings. I'll have to try to find some of those. And the magazine mixed fiction and nonfiction, often spotlighting new technologies, modern working women, and post-World War I culture. Remember, World War I officially ended in 1919. And these publications like the Green Book, they were a bridge between the genteel magazine culture and the coming mass market style of, say, Saturday Evening Post or Ladies' Home Journal. They seemed to be aiming at educated middle class readers, especially women, obviously and especially this article. The tone was optimistic, as you can hear in this article, moral but not preachy, and they were reflecting the new modern woman of the nineteen tens through nineteen twenties, who might work a job, ride a streetcar, and still read serialized romance on her lunch break. By 1920, America had just emerged from the Great War, the Nineteenth Amendment had just passed, and telephones were transforming daily life. The Green Book captured that intersection, technology, modernity, and gender, and that's exactly why the Telephone Girls piece fits so beautifully. It's journalism wrapped in narrative, showing women at the nerve center of modern communication. It's called simply telephone operators.

Unknown Narrator:

The telephone network relied on the switchboard and the operators who made it work. At first, the telephone industry employed young men and boys to handle the incoming calls. Switching rooms were hectic and confused. But by the 1920s, the industry had turned to women. They were also paid low wages, but were considered more manageable and reliable. The operators shown here handled long distance and special calls. For long distance, the operator dialed a central exchange in another city. Local calls would be connected from her own switchboard. Both tasks required an excellent memory and rapid hand motions. The job was not easy, but the women at the switchboard efficiently served millions of Americans every day. Number three. Thank you.

Natalie Zett:

Please subscribe or follow so you can keep up with all the episodes. And for more information, please go to my website. That's www.flowerinthher.com. I hope you'll consider buying my book available as audiobook, ebook, paperback, and hardcover because I still owe people money. And that's my running joke. But the one thing I'm serious about is that this podcast and my book are dedicated to the memory of all who experienced the Eastland disaster of nineteen fifteen. Goodbye for now.

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