When the late Harry Lee Sr. purchased LaHarpe Telephone Co. in the summer of 1950, wife Violet was less than thrilled.
Violet had grown up in St. Louis and moved to Kansas City after World War II.
Small town life held little allure for the cosmopolitan lady. She so opposed the thought of rural life that she joked the grooves in the road to LaHarpe were caused by her dragging her fingernails on the journey there.
But Violet soon learned to love her new home, their son, Harry Lee Jr., told an Iola Public Library audience Tuesday, to the point that any fingernail-imprinted blacktop would only have resulted if they tried to take her back to the city.
Mixing bits of telephone trivia with anecdotes about his company’s roots, Lee shared the history of LaHarpe Telephone, and how telephone service helped shape rural America.
Harry Lee Jr. shows a 1947 LaHarpe telephone directory at an Iola Public Library program Tuesday. REGISTER/RICHARD LUKEN
LAHARPE’S halcyon days were likely in the early years of the 20th century, Lee speculated. Buoyed by the large number of industrial foundries in Allen County, LaHarpe’s population was close to what Iola’s is now, complete with its own business district, vibrant neighborhoods, and even its own opera house.
As such, the community needed its own telephone service. LaHarpe was hardly unique in that aspect. Iola, Humboldt, Moran, Elsmore and other towns in southeast Kansas had their own services as well.
Problem was, each of those communities was a proverbial island unto itself, Lee explained. “If you lived in Moran, you couldn’t call somebody in LaHarpe.”
So the companies began forming their own communications pacts, stringing telephone lines from town to town (Bell Telephone was a key factor in the networking process.) Soon farmers joined the mix, extending lines to their respective homes, usually in rudimentary fashion, on such things as hedge posts instead of telephone poles.
The service continued to expand, although “a couple of world wars came into play,” which essentially stopped the progression in its tracks because the steel normally used for telephone lines rather was earmarked for military use.
Old lines, meanwhile began to degrade and fall apart.
In search of a solution, the telephone industry found itself working in league with electric service providers. The Rural Electrification Act of 1934 pledged to provide power to all reaches of the United States. One of REA’s provisions was to ensure folks in rural America could also have telephone service.
THEREIN stood another problem. Both the electric and telephonic infrastructure relied upon the same type of ground-return path systems to complete their respective grids. The process involved extending a single line to send either the electricity (or telephone) signal, then literally using the earth to act as a return path, thus negating the need for a second, neutral line.
