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THOMAS FARRAGHER

In a tiny town, a phone company

right out of a Rockwell painting
By Thomas Farragher Globe Columnist, 27
March 11, 2017, 5:56 p.m.

Richmond Telephone Company customer Marilyn Kirby was worried when a larger company acquired the
service, but little has changed. Kirby chatted with Bob Pratt, the company’s manager of
telecommunications. CRAIG F. WALKER/GLOBE STAFF

RICHMOND — She is a tiny woman with a wide smile and a memory sharp
enough to keenly recall those pesky rumors about her old job in this former
Massachusetts mining town on the New York border. But Nancy Benedict
wants you to know that she was no snoop.

“Did I listen in?’’ she asked, repeating the question. “Not really intentionally.
But you had to listen in to see if they were through talking.”

Benedict is 90 now, but back when she was young in post-war America, she
was the overnight operator at the microscopic Richmond Telephone
Company. She had a cot near the switchboard, plugging in customers sharing
party lines and occasionally calling firefighters at home before dawn to alert
them that a barn was burning.

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These days, Benedict — who now works a few days a week at Bartlett’s
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It has retained its remarkable independence despite space-age

telecommunication advancements in a field dominated by monolithic NOW
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corporate giants, where customers routinely wander into the mind-bending

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are on a first-name basis with the customers in a pamphlet-sized phone book. economy 95
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Turn the page 10 times and you’re done. The US Postal Service has the “U”
the
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Need help? It comes not from some soulless call center in India or
Indianapolis. In this town of 1,400, a friendly guy named Bob will be right
over.

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“This is still the Richmond Telephone Company, knock on wood,’’ said Bob
Pratt, who is the avuncular face of the company, a jack of all trades, who
repairs, splices, and installs. “Customer service is always first and foremost.
It’s very seldom that someone goes [an] hour out of order. We’ll be there in 10
minutes. Actually, in Richmond, you can be anywhere in 10 minutes.’’

Pratt, 61, has been with the company, in some capacity, for nearly 40 years.
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Long enough to recognize customers by their voice if not their number. His
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Pratt has been with the company, in some capacity, for nearly 40 years. CRAIG F. WALKER/GLOBE
STAFF/GLOBE STAFF

Richmond Telephone Company was organized in 1903 when 22 local citizens

each plunked down $70 for a share of stock and set up the fledgling
company’s first switchboard at the railroad station. In 1961, the late J.
Benedict Ackley bought the company from 13 stockholders. His daughter,
Lorinda Ackley-Mazur, was the company’s president and a local fixture.

“Everyone knew Lorinda,’’ said Marilyn Kirby, who moved here 36 years ago.
“It’s a small, small community.’’

Kirby remembers sitting on the sidelines with the company president, when
their sons played Little League baseball together. And she recalled the panic
she felt eight years ago when her beloved little phone company was acquired
by CornerStone Telephone Company in Troy, N.Y.

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YVONNE ABRAHAM
Boosting boosters

There goes our mom-and-pop phone service, Kirby thought. “I was so

nervous about that,’’ she said. And then something magical happened. JENEÉ OSTERHELDT
Nothing. Ketanji Brown Jackson and
‘the nature of a right’

Same dial tone. Same service. Same Bob Pratt.

ADRIAN WALKER
State should keep its hands off
She’s got his private numbers scratched on the back of her phone book, and
the Boston Public Schools
when her computer went on the fritz over the Christmas holiday she
reflexively reached for it, before being admonished by her husband. “I said,
SHIRLEY LEUNG
‘It’s OK. Bob doesn’t care.’ ” Can an extra $800 a month lift
someone out of poverty? Local
nonprofits put cash to the test.
And he doesn’t. In fact, Pratt, who knocked around pumping gas and working
at a trucking company before finding his true calling, prides himself on
THOMAS FARRAGHER
straight talk and lickety-split service. Facelift for a fabled submarine
that has sailed into history

“Your eyes can say a lot. You don’t have to say a word,’’ Pratt told me as we
stood in Kirby’s den where the aforementioned computer was purring. “What KEVIN CULLEN
A Labor secretary who is pro-
Richmond Telephone gives you is that smiling face and the caring look and labor? Heaven forbid.
the genuine concern.”

DAN MCGOWAN
When Kirby was being harassed by a scam artist who wouldn’t stop pestering The first Providence mayoral
her, warning she’d be arrested if she didn’t send him money pronto, Bob debate happens today

stepped in. He installed caller ID and instructed her to record the number of
the threatening pest. That put an end to that.

“I told Bob he could stop the caller ID,’’ Kirby, 67, said. “But he didn’t.’’

“It’s software in the switch,’’ Pratt explained. “It doesn’t cost us anything to
provide it.’’

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The customers can put their payments in the mail to the mother company in
Troy, but many choose to pay in person instead.

“They come in and talk to us,’’ Lee Pratt said. “We have a face-to-face
relationship with our customers. . . . If there’s an issue with the bill, we can
get it straightened out.’’

The company still displays antique phones at its office. CRAIG F. WALKER/GLOBE STAFF

When one customer was being wooed by a competitor, naturally she had
some questions that have become company lore.

“Can I walk in and talk to you?” Well, no. “Can I have same-day service?” No.
“OK, thanks, but no thanks.”

Just inside the front door, there is an old switchboard, its wires now dangling,
its switches dead. Across from it hangs a copy of Norman Rockwell’s 1948
painting, “The Lineman,’’ which depicts a strong and focused lineman in red-
and-black checked flannel, straddling a telephone pole to make a repair.

Rockwell, whose museum is nearby, created it as an advertisement for the

American Telephone and Telegraph Company. And its placement in the tiny
lobby of Richmond Telephone is no accident.

“It looks like a Norman Rockwell telephone company,’’ said Sally Comstock,
manager of customer service for Magna5, a Texas-based firm that now owns
the company. “You can’t get more Norman Rockwell-esque. And that’s what
they are to the folks in Richmond. There’s just a Mayberry feel to it all, and we
don’t want to take that away from them.’’

Even in its latest incarnation, Richmond Telephone Company has legally

retained its status as an independent operation and the tiniest telecom in the
Commonwealth.

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And even Nancy Benedict, who used to earn 50 cents an hour to work the old
magneto switchboard that has since been shipped to a Springfield science
museum, thinks that’s a bargain.

“I wouldn’t dream of having any other company as long as Richmond

Telephone is there,’’ she said, taking a break from her morning shift at
Bartlett’s.

Besides, she’s got a long driveway, and sometimes her line is taken down by a
fallen tree. She knows Bob will be there in 10 minutes to get her dial tone
back steady and true. Maybe he’ll bring some coffee, too.

CRAIG F. WALKER/GLOBE STAFF/GLOBE STAFF

Thomas Farragher is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at

thomas.farragher@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @FarragherTom.

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