[Hold the phone (2) By Donna Bond On August 16,-1947, a robber forced a taxi driver, Harold Malette, into the Royal Bank in Embrun and requested the Manager, J.A. Clouthier to hand over $26,000. Mr. Clouthier reached for a gun under the counter and fired at the gunman, but missed. The robber and taxi driver ran toward the door. The Manager fired another shot ac- cidentaly hitting the taxi driver, who then collapsed, and the rob- ber fled in the taxi towards Russell. Miss Ella Hamilton, a Russell operator on 'duty, learned of the holdup and also that a strange car seen whizzing through Russell had overturned outside the village. A call from Constable John Buchanan stated that he had been shot at by a man who had crawled out from under an over- turned car, uninjured. The con- stable, with his car keys, eluded the robber by plunging into the dense bush and prevented the rob- ber from taking the police car. Miss Hamilton called police and Operators help hook robber The Russell telephone office was once in this building which still stands near the corner of Mill and Conces- residents in order to form an arm- sion Streets. (Courtesy Keith Boyd) ed possé and other -operators volunteered their services byrelay- Operators had to use their own ing directions and search progress 'judgment in situations when to possé and O.P.P. By nightfall, drunks called and asked them 'to the search was about to be called place a call. An unimportant call off until daylight, when Mrs. during the night hours disturbed R.W. Gamble, the operator on everyone on the party line and so duty, received word that a the operator rang the New York suspicious stranger was on the Central Railway Station which outskirts of a neighbouring com- they knew was deserted at that munity. Police investigated and time. The drunk heard the ringing captured the bank robber. The and received no answer, but was Police returned to the Bell Office satisfied that the operator had at in Russell to call in their report Jeast tried. concerning the capture and to per- = When Russell's 200th telephone sonally thank the operators. The was installed in"1919, the operators later received $25. each telephone exchange moved to the for their help. corner store of the Flynn Block The operators also received Jocated at Broadway and Mill their share of nuisance calls.. Streets (where the Hardware Store There was a man who called every js today). It moved again to the day at 4 a.m. and asked for the centre store in the same block in time. Dorothy always told him 1925. Mr. Ronan was replaced by and he always called back the next Florence Booth in 1922 as Branch day. Finally, she'd had enough Manager and in 1935 she became and she gave him the wrong time; Local Representative with Russell he never called back. Manager and in 1935 she became was a different board and the calls were all long distance. Each board had 15 pairs of cords and when they were filled, the vacant cords in the next position were used. One hundred operators for long distance would be working at one time. Long distance calls were made to the West Indies and across Canada and the United States whereas calls from Russell went as far as Prescott and Corn- wall. The operators in Ottawa fill- ed in the tickets with the length of the call and from here the tickets were placed in a pigeon hole for someone else to look after. Operators: Kathleen Fraser (Mrs. Herb Miller); Hazel Moak (Mrs. Lawrence Brown); Florence Local Representative with Russell exchange reporting to the District Manager in Ottawa. The number of telephones declined during the depression and it was not until 1947 that Russell regained its 200th customer. During this increase in customers, in 1945 to be exact, the exchange moved to the Robert Atkinson Building on Broadway and Mill Streets (where Lorne Wade's shop is today) and the No. 1240 magneto switchboard was replaced by the No. 105B magneto to serve more customers when needed. In 1964, the telephone system went from different length rings to the dial operation as we know it today. Russell reached the 500th mark for telephones install- Booth; Florence Rombough; ed in 1968 and ten years later there 'Margaret Forsythe; Frances For- were 1077 phones in service and it sythe; Georgina Cherry; Edna has been increasing ever since. Curry; Edith Loucks; Dorothy In 1964, the Russell telephone Marquette; Joyce Boyd; Carrie exchange moved to Ottawa and _ Hall; Janet Fraser. ; Dorothy Marquette went too. The Part-time Operators: Gerry | Leroux EXCAVATING Excavators -- Backhoes Dozers -- Loaders -- Ditching Res.: (613) 445-5603 Bus.: (613) 236-6822 _ RUSSELL Box 39 KOA 380 . job of telephone operator was as Evelyn Savage; Evelyn Dey; different as day and night com- Ruth Gamble; Ella Hamilton; pared to that in Russell and Shirley Sterring; Unita Shahan. Dorothy had to be retrained. It' : : ~~ So you want to be a writer? Conducted by the editors of the Castor Review for the benefit of .those interested in the art of m. DON'S GAS BAR JDON MAY ELECTRICAL Residential Commercial Farm Free Estimates | -- Russell 445-5332 writing, or other aspects of the Media. From time to time, dif- ferent members of the Castor Review staff will contribute based on their own personal experience. Writing is the art of com- munication. Communication is conveying information. Your dai- ly newspaper is communication, so is television, so is radio. Most - of what you hear and see on radio and television has been written by someone. The next time you watch a TV situation comedy or other pro- gram, look for the names of the writers. On shows like Carol Burnett or Johnny Carson, there may be as many as a dozen. Sometimes, that's not enough. Other aspects of communica- tion are the telephone, telegraph, jungle drums, smoke signals, and shouting. Some people communicate with their eyes or their hips as well as with words. This is known as body language. You don't get paid for it, usually. If you want to get paid, it usually has to come off a typewriter. What is a typewriter? It is a machine which uses metal keys to punch out letters on a ribbon. This sounds elementary, but try writing without a typewriter. A typewriter is 'important, because if you want to be a profes- sional writer, you have to use one. The reason you have to use one, is because people in a hurry cannot be bothered trying to make out -your scrawl. There is no jour- nalism course specializing in chicken tracks. In the old days, great cor- respondents like William Howard Russell of the London Times would take along a_ portable writing desk to the battle of Bull Run, or Sevastopol and scribble out their impressions by hand and ~ send it back using relays of horses. It's not done that way anymore. The telegraph made it possible for readers in London to read about the battle in the Morning Post or Daily Telegraph the next morning, while Russell's horses still hadn't gotten out of Balaclava. Such is progress. One of the finest war cor- respondents was a young fellow ' called Winston Churchill. Recent- ly graduaterd from Sandhurst, he accompanied Kitchener to Om- durman in an attempt to rescue General Gordon. The attempt failed but Churchill wrote some terrific despatches for the Morn- ing Post and he wrote a book call- ed "The River War", still a classic of its kind. : Loral Home Guy Brasseur Ltd. 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