“With the phone out, maybe I’ll be able to get some sleep without that nut calling me up in the middle of the night to tell me how to run a down-and-in pattern.” — Don Shula, coach of the Miami Dolphins.
“Mewling, mendacious, militantly macrocephalic megalomaniacs, by mischievously modulating—nay, murderously mutilating!—Ma’s mellifluous mouthpiece machinery, have meticulously and methodically micturated on the mute majority’s magistracy, thereby manufacturing a monody to morality too monstrous to meditate!”-- Spiro T. Agnew.
“This could never have happened in Germany!”—- Wernher Von Braun.
“Without a phone, what is there left to live for?”-— Martha Mitchell.
“Nobody ever calls me -anyway.”-- Hubert Humphrey.
“So I’ll build my own telephone company.”—Aristotle Onassis.
“So few people are worth talking to. . . .”—-Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
“Don’t call me; I'll call you.”—Senator Edward F. Kennedy.
“Now phone booths can be converted into orgone boxes. . . . Try it, you’ll like it!”—J., Author of The Sensuous Woman.
“He’s not asking you; he’s telling you! India is responsible for the phone crisis!”—Dr. Henry Kissinger to a TOP SECRET meeting of presidential advisers, as quoted in Jack Anderson’s column.
"1 wonder who’s Kissinger now?”--Jack Anderson.
“With proper reconditioning, we can learn to do without phones just as we can learn to do without food, water, and sex.”— B. F. Skinner.
“Existentially, it’s a gas!”—Norman Mailer.
“I have positive proof that well-organized, militant revolutionaries are responsible!"’—Richard Kleindienst.
“Here we go again.”—Father Daniel Berrigan.
“I don’t care if there is no telephone service. I still demand an unlisted number!”—Elizabeth Taylor.
“You’d better give it to her.”— Richard Burton.
“There are no immediate plans to take over A.T.&T.” -— A spokesman for a spokesman for a spokesman for Howard Hughes.
“You don’t need a phone to talk to Jesus.”— Oral Roberts.
“I’m embarking on a full-scale investigation of the telephone company aimed at democratizing its monopolistic structure.”— Ralph Nader.
“There will be a full-scale investigation of Ralph Nader."’—-A spokesman for Bell Telephone.
“We will cooperate fully in the full-scale investigation of Ralph Nader.”—A spokesman for General Motors.
“First Penn Central, now Ma Bell! America must find God before it’s too late!”— Billy Graham.
“Remember the Alamo! Remember the Maine! Remember Pearl Harbor! Remember Ma Bell.”— John Wayne.
“Strictly as a private citizen, understand, with no official connection with the government, just as a matter of personal conscience, I’m offering to do a benefit for Ma Bell.”— Bob Hope.
“Telephones suck.”—Abbie Hofiman.
Who says the silence shall endure?
Ma Bell is proud! Ma Bell is pure!
Have faith in her! Faith is the cure!
Our faith shall wash away her pain!
Her wires shall sing in snow and rain!
Who says they shan’t go “hum” again?”
Rod McKuen.
“Ommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm- mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm . . .” — Allen Ginsberg
While notables issued statements and private citizens adjusted to the phone failure, a variety of American institutions — other utilities, large corporations, labor unions, foundations, universities, etc.— were also affected, and also reacted. The Con Edison management, secretly delighted to be incommunicado, laid off thousands of employees whose sole function had been to lend their ears to telephoned complaints from dissatisfied customers. Con Ed also issued a letter of condolence to Ma Bell.
The New York City Transit Workers’ Union demanded parity with telephone operators being paid for a no-hour day and threatened to shut down the subways if the demand wasn’t met.
Harvard University set up a Department of Viable Alternatives to Telephone Communication and hired the French mime Marcel Marceau23 to head it. Black students insisted upon and got their own program. They imported a tom-tom expert from Tanganyika to set it up.
The Ford Foundation financed a study on the effects of the phone blackout on starving Appalachian families, most of whom had never been able to afford a telephone. One interviewer was strung up to a telephone pole. The note attached to his body warned sociologists to stay out of Appalachia and let the people starve in peace.
Anaconda Copper, foreseeing that Ma Bell would have to replace certain equipment, raised its prices in defiance of the administration’s wage-price freeze. Bethlehem Steel quickly followed suit. The Steelworkers’ Union, anticipating the effect of the rise in prices, demanded a cost-of-living wage increase. Nixon’s Wage and Price Freeze Board granted the Anaconda and Bethlehem requests and turned thumbs down on the union’s demands, citing “free enterprise” in the first instance and “anti-inflationary measures” in the second.
IBM was hardest hit. With thousands of customers denied phone access to its shared-time computers24 , the corporation’s income nosedived. So did the value of its stock, which, together with the sharp drop A.T.&T. took, sent Wall Street into its worst spin since 1929. The country tottered on the brink of depression.
The situation was saved when the federal government stepped in with subsidies for all major corporations affected by the phone hush. The Secretary of the Treasury went on national television to explain to the American people that this wouldn’t really cost them anything since the money was being diverted from welfare programs, which — as everybody knew anyway — were feeding troughs for the lazy. He added that there was sound fiscal precedent for the action, since the government had been subsidizing the oil industry for years.
Subsequently, IBM received a government contract for its computers to analyze just how big a piece of the subsidy pie each corporation should get. Thus it was the U.S. government which picked up the computer time. But there was one computer to which the United States no longer had access — the one in South America, the most important one of all, the one that would decide the fate of the world!
And Tom Swift controlled that one!
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
In the basement room of the Juarez brothel, the little old lady was knitting away like Madame DeFarge25 . Cigaretteless, I was nibbling my nails down to the first knuckle. Bugs Ameche was hunched over a tape-p1ayback machine, listening with earphones, jotting down notes on a pad, and cursing to himself.
“I’ve traced it from Juarez through El Paso, Kansas City, and San Francisco,” he told us, disgruntled and muttering. “Tom used a loop-around in Frisco -- very tricky —coming out of Telstar26 from Tokyo. From Tokyo I’ve followed it to Siberia, Moscow, Bonn, and London, where it came out of the transatlantic cable. Going into the cable is where I lose him. There’s some damn sound I can’t figure for beans. It’s like no tandem relay I’ve ever heard before. Listen.”