Transcript of interview with Joanne Pattiani Molen by Irene Rostine, January 25, 1997

An Interview with Joanne Pattiani Molen An Oral History Conducted by Irene Rostine, M.A. ______________________________________________ Las Vegas Women Oral History Project University of Nevada, Las Vegas 1997 ii ? NSHE, Women’s Research Institute of Nevada, 1997 Produced by: Las Vegas Women Oral History Project Women’s Research Institute of Nevada, UNLV Dr. Joanne L. Goodwin, Director Irene Rostine, M.A., Interviewer Tamara Marino, Transcription iii iv This interview and transcript have been made possible through the generosity of donors to the Women’s Research Institute of Nevada. The College of Liberal Arts provides a home for the Women’s Research Institute of Nevada, as well as a wide variety of in-kind services. The History Department provided necessary reassignment for the director, as well as graduate assistants for the project. The department, as well as the college and university administration, enabled students and faculty to work together with community members to generate this selection of first-person narratives. The participants in this project thank the university for its support that gave an idea the chance to flourish. The text has received minimal editing. These measures include the elimination of fragments, false starts, and repetitions in order to enhance the reader’s understanding of the material. All measures have been taken to preserve the style and language of the narrator. In several cases, photographic sources (housed separately) accompany the collection as slides or black and white photographs. The following interview is part of a series of interviews conducted under the auspices of the Las Vegas Women Oral History Project. Additional transcripts may be found under that series title. Dr. Joanne Goodwin, Project Director Associate Professor, Department of History Women’s Research Institute of Nevada, Director University of Nevada Las Vegas v Preface In July of 1955, Joanne Molen’s husband, a veteran of the United States Army Navy Air Corps, was offered a job at Nellis Air Force Base. The job offer was prompted by the Base’s Operation Home Front, an initiative designed to improve relations between the Base and the Las Vegas community by offering employment to civilians. Prior to moving to Las Vegas, Joanne was working for Citizens Utilities in Alturas as a Western Union teletype operator, a position which would serve as a springboard for her forty-plus year career in the telecommunications industry in Las Vegas. While working at Citizens Utilities, Joanne learned the billing and accounting side of the telephone business. She also handled trouble calls, cleaned instruments, and typed listings for the PBX board. As a woman, she was never given the official title of “Wire Chief,” but during her time with Citizens Utilities, she replaced a man who was leaving his position as Wire Chief. This was not the last time Joanne would find herself working as “a woman in a man’s position.” It was this experience that qualified her for a position with the then Southern Nevada Telephone Company (SNTC) when she arrived in the Valley. SNTC was originally part of one, larger company that provided telephone and power service to Las Vegas and Henderson. However, shortly before her move here the company was split into three separate companies, comprising the Henderson telephone company, the Las Vegas telephone company, and the Valley’s power company. Also during this time period, the telephone industry was transitioning from teletype to dial service. She initially went to work for SNTC as an “A Cutter” making $1.20 per hour. At the time, she was the only woman to hold such a position. A few months later, her pay would be raised by five cents per hour as a “token” of the Company’s commitment to equal pay between men and women. However, she was now vi training men to do the same job she was doing, but the men were still making twice as much as her per hour. Joanne laughs as she recalls the day when one of the men protested about the position Joanne held as his boss, proclaiming, “I’m class A. She is only class B. She can’t hold that job.” Joanne’s boss responded, “Well, thank you for bringing that to my attention. Joanne, you are now class A.” Over the next several years, Joanne’s work ethic and smarts would result in her promotion to an Engineer, then A Cutter Foreman, and then Main Engineer. Over the next four decades, Joanne not only witnessed the transition from teletype to dial, but also from wire to fiber optic cable and manual to electronic/computerized operating systems. She would experience, first hand, the impact the 1963 Equal Pay Act had on woman in her field, including her, and witness the impact of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The Telecommunications Act is what led to the arrival of the Sprint Corporation in Las Vegas. Not only would Joanne find herself working for Sprint, but the Corporation became the premier provider of telecommunications in Las Vegas and leader in technological advances in the industry. Joanne’s oral history not only chronicles the story of a woman who worked her way up in a predominately male industry, but also provides a glimpse of the plight of a working mother in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and how time management and planning kept a busy household with four children running smoothly. She also shares how technological advances, such as computerization, benefited women in the industry and, in some cases, ultimately gave them an advantage over male workers. Joanne also found time to give back to her community during the last forty years. She was an active member of St. Thomas Episcopal Church, serving on their Council, vii and has been a member of the American Women’s Business Association, noting that she has never missed a monthly meeting in forty years. True to her family’s patriotism, Joanne was also active with both the American Ex-Prisoners of War and the Disabled American Veterans. This involvement led Governor Richard Bryan to appoint Joanne to the State of Nevada’s Veterans Advisory Commission where she became the first woman to hold the position of Chairman for the Commission. She was also voted “Women of the Year” four times by the local chapter of the American Business Women’s Association for her work with veterans in the Las Vegas community. Clearly, Joanne is an extraordinary woman who overcame many of the challenges faced by women in the telecommunications industry, as well as those faced by all working women during the time period covered in this oral history. She also serves as an inspiration for all women through her positive attitude and efforts to give back to her community. At the time this interview took place, she was preparing for her retirement from Sprint and stated, “When I was a kid, I always said I would rather dance than eat, but I haven’t done much dancing. So, now that I am retiring, I might dance again.” Her oral history leaves no doubt that Joanne is “dancing” in Las Vegas. viii An Interview with Joanne Pattiani Molen An Oral History Conducted by Irene Rostine, M.A. ix 1 This is an oral interview with Joanne Pattiani Molen in Las Vegas, Nevada by Irene Rostine, on January 25, 1997, at 12:30 p.m. Good afternoon, Joanne. Before we begin our interview, I would like to read you the Deed of Gift Agreement. [Agreement Read] Do you agree to these conditions? Yes, I do. Joanne, tell me what were the circumstances that brought you to Las Vegas. Were you looking for work when you came here? My husband was looking for a better job. At the time, he was working in Alturas, California for the Postal Department as a temporary clerk. He was deemed to be a temporary clerk until someone else died or vacated a position, which didn’t seem very likely. He had been in the old Army, the U.S. Army Navy Air Corps portion of it, and had worked on helicopters. During one of his duties, he had a posted notice that they were looking for helicopter mechanics at Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas. He sent in a resume and they called and wanted him to come down for the interview. We came for the interview and, therefore, we moved here on July 1st of 1955. Did you have children, Joanne, at that time? We had two. My two older ones were born in Alturas and the other two were native Las Vegans. So, you have four children. Where did you live when you first came here? When we first came here, we lived about a month in the La Nevada Trailer Park on Las Vegas Boulevard just south of Cheyenne. It’s no longer there now, but we lived there because it was about the only place we thought we could even find a space. Before we 2 came down, I knew several people who had come from Alturas to Las Vegas working for the old Southern Nevada Telephone Company. They sent me newspapers. We came down here with a whole house of furniture thinking we had a house to move all this into. I had talked to this realtor and this woman would be moving out. We were going to lease [her house] with an option to buy. So, I arrived here on July the 1st at a motel and contacted the fellow and he said, “Oh yes, everything is fine.” So, I gave up my motel room 4th of July weekend in Las Vegas and, later that afternoon, I drove by this house. There were all kinds of furniture and everything sitting out in the carport. I thought, “Well, the trucks coming any minute.” So, I went up and asked the lady if she would mind if I brought a mattress in that I had brought down with me in the back seat. I asked her if she would mind if I brought it in and put it on the floor so the two boys could lay down and take a nap. She informed me her house wasn’t ready. It wouldn’t be ready for at least another month and she was not ready to move. So, I was in Las Vegas, coming from the mountains where it was cool down to the heat, and I had just given up my motel room. What did you do then? Well, I drove to Boulder City and went every place I saw houses for rent, which were very scarce then. I ended up in a little twelve-foot trailer at the old [inaudible] Trailer Park. In the trunk of the car, I had a clothes basket that I had put some pots and pans in it and I had a picnic basket that had dishes and silverware in it. I had my clothes pins because I had one in diapers. I could cook in this little trailer and so-forth. On the day of the 4th of July, I had gone down to do some laundry and this woman said that she was going to go up to the mountains. Her church was having a picnic up there and we were 3 more than welcome to go. I thought, “Man, that sounds pretty good. It must be cooler up there.” We got up there and couldn’t find any place to park. So, we turned around and came back. I had turned a swamp cooler on and, when I came back, I had about two inches of water on the bottom of the trailer. I really seriously thought about turning around and going back to Alturas. In the meantime, my husband had left. There was a fellow that delivered mail and he had this huge, great big, covered van and he had never been to Vegas. So, he volunteered, for a price, to bring all of our furniture down. So, he was on the road and my husband was also on the road with a pickup full of stuff pulling a trailer. So, that night I stood out on the sidewalk waiting to see him go by so I could wave him down to tell him, “Hey, we have no place to take that furniture to.” Did you have to store it? We stored it out behind where we lived for a while. The next day, there was just nothing in town to rent or anything. There was a big housing shortage at that period? They were just building College Park at the time. So, we went down and bought a little 32-foot Liberty Trailer, one bedroom, and we got a space at this La Nevada. The big van had to [go] back. So, we unloaded it in the desert right behind where our trailer was and covered it with tarps until we could make arrangements to get it into storage. It stayed in storage and we eventually sold it. It was eating us up in storage. We eventually sold the biggest part of our good furniture back to a kid who was getting out of the military and [the military was] willing to ship his furniture for him. Now, your husband went to work at Nellis? He was in the military or working for them? 4 No, just working for the military. So, they couldn’t help you with any arrangements? No. He was hired out there in what they called at that time Operation Home Front. At that particular time, the way I understood it, there was a lot of animosity between the military and the townspeople. The Base decided they were going to hire civilians for some of the work out there to try and make better relations between the community and the Base. So, when we came down he was interviewed for this helicopter mechanic job. They said, “Well, gee, you’ve got such a good background,” because he had aeronautical engineering and structural design in college. They said, “Would you like to work on jets?” He told them, “Well, I can honestly tell you I have never seen a jet outside of a news reel.” They said, “Well, that’s ok. Stay there.” They went up and talked to the Commanding Officer and asked permission to train him on the line on jets at the Base. That’s what he did until he got sick. You mentioned the words “news reel.” Was that really your big form of disseminating information back in 1955? In ‘55 they had TV in Las Vegas, Nevada, but they didn’t have it in Alturas. [Laughing] If you saw the World News, it was on the theatre screen at the theatres. How old were you when all this took place, Joanne? I was 26 when we moved here. Did you have any previous work experience outside the home when you came here? Yes. I went to work just before my 13th birthday in a flower shop. They had an apartment in the back of the store. I was basically hired to do dishes, laundry, and things like that. I 5 also helped unload flowers. They had fine gifts also. I ended up being a floral designer, a bill doer, and everything. [Laughing] Did you do arrangements? Yes, I did arrangements. I made corsages, funeral arrangements, hospital bouquets, and all that. I worked there until the day before my first child was born and then I still went back and helped with the holidays. When I decided I was going to have to go back to work, I wanted to be able to get my ironing done without it mildewing. [Laughing] So, I was looking for a job where I knew that I was going to be home. I went to work for Citizens Utilities which was the phone company in Alturas, but the job I was hired for was part-time. I was going to work half a day and then about six hours on Saturdays doing Western Union because they had the franchise for the Western Union. Oh, how interesting. Were you a teletype operator at Western Union? What were your duties? I would wait on the counter and send the messages on the teletype. It was a job. I didn’t really like it for the main reason on Saturdays we had a lot of Mexican nationals that worked there for the railroad. On Saturdays, they all came in to wire money home. It was an experience trying to find all these little towns in the books and then figuring out how much to charge. They didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Spanish. [Laughing] It was kind of frustrating sometimes. You would sit and hope their money got where it was going and that they were a satisfied customer. That really only lasted for about three weeks and then they wanted to know if I would work full-time and help with the telephone work. They hired another girl to do this Saturday bit. Did you learn telephone work? Was that your first introduction to telephone work? 6 Yes. My first job was posting accounts on bill payments and so-forth. They had several men that worked in the back and one of them was leaving. He had what they called the wire chief’s job and they didn’t know what they were going to do. They said, “We can teach Joanne how to do it. She’ll catch on. She’ll know how to do it.” They took me in the back and I learned how to run the jumpers on the frame. [This refers to the process of running wires in the Central Office. There are colored plastic wires and one wire is the “finder” wire which stays in the Central Office. One wire leaves the Central Office and goes to a terminal and then to the customer.] I took all the trouble calls for the little town. I cleaned the instruments with carbon tetrachloride and put them on top of the order that I had typed. I typed up the listings and took them in and put them on the PBX board. [A PBX board is a multiple line switchboard located at the customer’s premises. The PBX operator can connect calls to the extensions in the place of business.] I counted all the coin that came in. I helped a lot still with what was going on in the front office, too, to keep me busy. So you were an actual wire chief then. In what year was that? That was probably 1954. 1954? Yes. I never had a title of wire chief, but I replaced the one that was leaving. You did the work. What about the trouble calls that came in? Did you take care of those, too, or just make reports on it? I just made the reports and then I would get ahold of the installer repair man and have him go out and do it. Do you remember Herb Owens? Yes. 7 He was my installer repair man in Alturas. Is that right? You both came here and you actually did the jumpers? The jumpers on the frame and hooked them all up. So that was your introduction and that is how you got your experience? That’s how I got some of my best experience, probably. I had an old fellow. His name was Al Bush. If he told you something once, you better listen because he wasn’t going to repeat it a second time. He was an old time telephone person and if you listened you learned a lot from him. In doing this job, what kind of reaction did you get from the men repairman installers? How did they feel about a woman doing this type of work replacing a wire chief? I think Al Bush, the old timer, I think he kind of thought it was a little strange, but the rest of them, I don’t think it bothered them any. They accepted you because you could do the job? Yes. I think that’s the truth throughout my career, really. I have run into people who you had to prove that you knew what you were doing and, once you proved you knew what you were doing and everything, well they kind of prodded you a little and then they eased up an awful lot. [Laughing] They let up on the pressure? Yes. I can remember one in particular, but anyway...we moved out here because [inaudible] had a better job and, when I first came down here, I went to apply at the phone company and they could not hire me or talk to me hardly, but they did take my application because they converted to dial on August 1st of 1955. They had to give 8 everybody who wanted an opportunity the chance to move over into the plant side and try to learn assigning or card posting or whatever else was being done in that section of the company. [“Assigning” is the process that determines what cable and pair in the Central Office is used to tie to a terminal in the field side of an installation. “Card Posting” occurs when an order is completed. Personnel put the name, address, telephone number, and the cable/pair/terminal number of the subscriber on a card, as well as the type of equipment the customer has.] Some of them tried it and they just said they would never get the hang of it and they went ahead and took their unemployment instead. In the meantime, I went to work for Las Vegas Florist and I was making a $1.25 an hour. It got to the point where when I left every night I could deliver everything north of Fremont Street and all the way out to Nellis Air Force Base. It was in October. It was dark. I was sitting out there taking the hours to get home every night because I am out there looking for addresses in the dark delivering flowers in my own car and [using] my own gas. No reimbursement for using your own car? No. “You can deliver these on your way home.” Then the phone company called and said that they would like to have me come in for an interview. So I went into the phone company for my interview and they hired me. It was a $1.20 an hour. So, I took a cut in pay to go to work for them. Well, at least you could get home after work. [Laughing] Yes, at least I knew what my hours were and I had vacation and some sick pay type thing. A lot more security than I had at the flower shop. Did they hire you as the line assigner in the plant? 9 Well, when I walked through the door Bill Skates was to be my supervisor. He said, “Well, hi! I’m Bill Skates. You’re going to be an A cutter.” I said, “I am going to be a what?” and he said, “an A cutter.” And I said, “Well, I am sorry, but I don’t even know the phrase. I don’t know what an A cutter does.” He said, “That’s ok. We talked to your bosses where you came from and they said if we showed you, you could do it.” At that time, an A cutter job is to prepare the paper work that tells the frame people how to change jumpers from one pair to another. The splicers in the field also use it to tell them what cable pair to splice to another and what their transferring and so-forth, which gets kind of complicated sometimes. Then there is all the inside record work to do and in that day and age it was in cable record books and on line cards. The main thing that I was hired for when they cut to dial is hard to explain to somebody that isn’t familiar with telephone. They had the old cables going in where the old vault was and they had little wires in that went from there to the new vault. So in actuality, the service to the customer was coming from the customer’s house into the new vault and being jumpered over to the old vault to the old main frame to get the dial tone. So, these cut sheets were removing that piece of jumper wire between the two frames. [A “cut” is the name given to the paperwork that was required to initiate a change in cables and pairs.] Did they have two systems going at once until they were ready to cut and then your work was to draft paperwork to get the cuts? Yes, to remove this interface. At the time I went to work there, all the cables were 101 pair lead cables and on a cable pair you could, by using certain devices, have eight people on a cable pair. So, 101 pair cables were actually serving 808 people. And you kept all that straight? 10 Yes and all the cables were 101 pair lead cables and now we are putting in 3,600 pair cables when we put new terminations on the frame and so-forth. 3,600? Yes, 3,600, and when I started they were all 101 pair. [Laughing] Did they give you any training or did they just show you how? Were there formal classes? No, just “This is the way you do it. These are the cable pairs here. This is the line finder.” That’s what they called it then, but nowadays with computers, they call it “LAN.” “This is the line finder. This is the telephone number. This is how you tell who is getting what ring.” Now there are very, very few even two-party lines in Las Vegas. I do know of a few that are still two-party, primarily business wise, but very, very few. If they ever disconnect, nobody else can sign up for them anymore, but at that time, on a four party line, they had a little block on the frame and, depending on where you were on the block, it had a different cycle ringing. So, when the tone came through, it told it which phone to ring according to the cycle that it was sitting on. Were you the only woman that was doing this kind of work in the plant? Yes. The one and only? I was the only one who did it. Until I got there, there had only been one cut written to do this and Bill Skates had written it himself. So, you were really doing a man’s job then? Basically, yes. But you didn’t get the man’s pay did you? 11 No. That was a big promise; that they would raise me to $1.25. I had been there probably about six months and one day I got my paycheck and I headed out the side door on my lunch hour. I waited until I got out the door and these two big tears came down and I walked right in to Allye Lawson, who owned company. He said, “Well, Joanne, what’s wrong?” and I said, “My raise still isn’t on my paycheck.” [Laughing] So, Allye said, “Settle down and you go to lunch. When you get back, you’re going to have that raise.” It seemed it was sitting on the CEO’s desk and had been there a long time. He just never signed and approved it. So, when I got back, Allye had called over there and it was approved. It was retroactive back to the day that he had told them he wanted to put it on in the first place. So, I finally got raised back to a $1.25 like I had been making at my other job. [Laughing] Tell me a little bit about Allye Lawson and the history of who owned the company and what the name of it was when you came because it was just a small independent company, wasn’t it? When I first went to work there, it was called Southern Nevada Telephone Company, but prior to that it had been a combination of the telephone company in Henderson and Las Vegas and the power company. It was three partners, Sam Lawson, Harry Allen, and Herschel Trumbo. The three of them owned these three little companies. When they decided to each go their own ways, Harry Allen took the power, Sam Lawson took Las Vegas telephone and Hershel Trumble took the Henderson telephone. So, when I want to work there it was a small company. We only had one central office. Sam Lawson was still alive, but I don’t believe I ever saw him if he ever did come to the office. He had his little house and he had his telephone. His son used to talk to him all the time, but Allye 12 basically represented the family in the business at that time. I do remember that, at one time, IBM practically owned us because that’s who we borrowed money from. Any time we needed to put a new cable in, we borrowed more money from IBM. [Laughing] If they ever foreclosed, they could have had the company. It was kind of a shoestring operation. So there was a lot different feeling in the early days than there is now as far as relations between employees and the executives? Like Allye was an executive, but you could talk to him and say, “Allye, I didn’t get my raise?” They didn’t’ have any place for me to sit except upstairs by the frame room. They called it the mezzanine and we called it the garrote. I don’t think it was any more than maybe 8 feet by 12 feet and then another little section going about another 8 by 12 feet. Allye Lawson sat in one place and I sat over here [gesture]. Mary Hill and I sat against this other wall. Mary was the first woman that did engineering for Southern Nevada Telephone. She wrote the jobs and I wrote the cuts to go with the jobs. At that time, Tom Herston was an engineer and Bob Gentry, that doesn’t sound right, anyway, he quit the phone company shortly after I went to work there. So, it was a kind of comfortable, cozy, family-type business at that time rather than a big corporate structure where people are just numbers? Were you on a first name basis with everybody? With almost everybody. You didn’t interface with the operators too much, but you saw them at the Canary Cottage [Laughing] and then various other places and places where people went and had lunch and something like that. You would see them coming in and out of the building and always say “hello” and so-forth. A lot of the operators, I knew 13 their faces. I didn’t know their names. I knew them well enough to say, “Hello, how are you today?” or something. So, that was just a distinct separate division, the operators and the people in the plant? The operators, you never saw them over where we were. When I went to work there, your business office was not even in the building. It was just basically the operators, the boards, the switchman, and the people that worked in the plant section. Was that located at Fifth and Carson? Is that where the building was? Yes, it was right there. It was actually a portion of what is the building now. They added on to it. The commercial office at that time, the White Bunny building or something they called it, it was down on Las Vegas Boulevard probably between Lewis and Clark, maybe. I know they always called White Bunny building [Laughing]. It was an ice cream place. [Laughing] Do you have any idea about how many employees were in your section when you went there? You were the only woman that did the work that you did? Yes. The rest were male employees? Everybody on the test board were men. All of the frame men were men. All of the switchmen were men. Repair clerks were girls. They just took all repair orders? They took repair calls. That was Sue Sukobik and Betty, little Betty, Betty Ewing. They took all the repair calls and the tubs with the cards and everything were right behind the test board. They sat right there and took the repair calls, pulled the cards and gave them 14 to the guys on the test board. At that time I think there was four test men. You had line assigners there and they were probably about four line assigners and then people that tore the orders apart and got the copies out to the assigners. Where the line assigners male also? They were female. They were female. What about the union at that time? Was there a union? Yes, there was. The IBEW [International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers]. Did you join, Joanne? Yes. You thought it was beneficial? I had belonged to the IBEW. In California, it is a closed state. I belonged to the union there. I just transferred my membership down here when I came down here. Although you don’t have to belong to the union, but I did. I still have a withdraw card from them because when I went into management I had to pull away from the union, but I still have the withdraw card if I ever wanted to entertain the thought about going back to work through the union I could. You felt it was beneficial then because they were responsible? Did they get you more benefits or anything like that? I’ve often said I think unions are good to a point. If I was a business man and I wanted to let someone go, I wouldn’t want somebody to tell me I had to keep them just because [they] had been there awhile. I do think if it weren’t for the unions people would still be working for very, very low salaries. And corporations getting richer? 15 Right. I never felt like I shouldn’t pay union dues, because the only raises you got were through the union. Did you every hold a union position? No, never. You were never a grievance person or anything like that? No. What was your next job then with the phone company? Well, basically I stayed with that for quite some time and it got to where we were busier and busier. We hired additional people that I trained to do cuts and so-forth. Some of them were men who made more than I did. Really? Tell me about that. That is such an interesting topic nowadays. Well, we had a couple of men who had been in engineering. They weren’t producing there so they were looking for some place else to put them. They put them down there for me to train and I was kind of the foreman of that little section. By this time I was probably up to about $2.10 or so and they were making $4 or $5 an hour. [Laughing] Twice as much and you taught them how to do it? Right, and eventually they let them go. [End Tape 1 Side A] [Begin Tape 1 Side B] Joanne, before we changed the tape you told me that you had an opportunity to go to engineering, but I would like to backtrack a little and go back to this first position that you had. You mentioned that you were more or less foreman over this group 16 and that you taught men that had come down from engineering. Were you actually the foreman of the work group, officially the foreman? Yes. Did you get any differential pay for taking this extra responsibility? Yes, it was an extra 10 cents an hour. How many total employees did you have under you at that time? Do you remember? Probably it varied. Anywhere from five and at one time in that position I even had some test men that reported directly to me. So, there were times when it was about ten. Did you ever experience any resentment from men that were under you because you were the foreman, especially with engineers that had come down and would think “I’m an engineer and I am taking orders?” I didn’t have as much trouble from them as I did from the test men. Can you give me some examples of the test men? We came under the union contract as class B because we worked with cable splicers who were also class B on the men’s pay scale. Test men were class A. They made a little bit more than class B. This one particular man didn’t like