This telephone switchboard connecting calls to Township of West Milford municipal offices in use until 1975 is now at the West Milford Museum. (
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It was exciting for people in the villages throughout the Township of West Milford when in the mid 1930s telephone service became available. Arthur Cahill (1923-2007) remembered an exciting event in the spring of 1935 in his family home on Second Avenue in West Milford Village. “We got a telephone!” he told me, many years ago.
A big wooden box hung on the wall with a crank on the side. This was a seven-party line, with seven homes hooked into the same line. Curious people could listen to conversations of others. You never knew who was listening in to your conversation,” Art said. “That’s where the phrase ‘Hello, is the party to whom I’m taking to the one I called? came from.”
A telephone office was in a private Lincoln Avenue home. It was the second building coming from Greenwood Lake Turnpike (Route 511), on Lincoln Avenue, Art said. “Greenwood Forest Fire Company was the only one around in those days. When the woman phone operator received a call reporting a fire alarm she just plugged in all the lines and rang the phones like heck to alert everyone there was a fire emergency.
“There was a big fire gong on the northwest corner of the Union Valley/Marshall Hill intersection”, Art continued. “It had a large hammer hanging from it for anyone there to ring the bell announcing a fire had broken out. Needless to say, there was not much left of whatever building was on fire by the time the fire company got to the fire scene. The Greenwood Forest Fire Company had a good record of saving foundations.”
On the other end of the township at Echo Lake, Dave Mathews’s general store and gas station was the location for the first area telephone. Like the one Art described, the phone was a big wooden box on the wall, but to use it one had to insert a required number of coins. The business was in a log cabin which served as the store before Dave built the building that remains at the corner of Macopin and Germantown Road today. A few years later party line phones were installed in homes with exchange Newfoundland 9 followed by four numbers for individual phones. Residents knew which home the incoming phone call was for by the number of rings sounded by the phone operator. With home television sets not available until years later the telephone was too often a source of entertainment for people the phone call was not for. People could pick up their phones on rings that were not for them and listen in to other people’s conversations.
There were no telephones or nurses in the rural schoolhouses. Nearest hospitals were in Paterson and Franklin. When a child was hurt the teacher applied first aid. At Echo Lake School, for example, I remember times when my mother, Verina Mathews Genader, teacher of three or four grade levels in the primary grade room, patched up kids who were hurt in the classroom or on the playground. If an injury was serious, a boy from the upper grade room would run to Dave Mathews’s store (operated by Verina’s brother) at the corner of Echo Lake Road (now named Macopin Road) and Germantown Road to phone for help. John Moeller would show up at the school after an emergency call went from Dave to the Pompton Lakes Police Radio center. The dispatcher, handling calls for all area police departments, would somehow get word to John that he was needed at the school to transport an injured child for medical help. West Milford First Aid Squad was not organized before the 1940s. It formed after Constance Struble, who after graduating from Echo Lake School eighth grade, was killed in a sleigh riding accident the following winter. (Story published in the West Milford Messenger issue of Feb. 27-March 5 “Sleigh Riding Tragedy”).
