Who wants to call McGregor??

It’s strange the way remembering one thing will suddenly bring up others that have been submerged for what seems like forever.  Thinking about “what do you want with a book?” got me to thinking about telephones, and rural phone service.

Rural phone service in Texas (OK, in other places as well) has always been an orphan, which just didn’t pay enough for any phone company to be bothered with it.  Delegations of farmers, ranchers, and other country residents wasted TONS of hours in the Thirties and Forties meeting with Bell System and other phone company functionaries, trying to interest them in providing phone service outside the towns.  Any kind of phone service.  Party lines, single-user, vampire taps, whatever they could get.  And none of it did a scrap of good, which is how lots of rural telephone co-operatives got started.  People finally woke up and realized this was a case of the Little Red Hen, and if they wanted phone service they better do it themselves.

But during the time they were still meeting, in the years before the Rural Telephone Act of 1949, a group from my part of North Central Texas went to Washington to meet with yet another bunch of phone-o-crats, hoping to get some sort of commitment from them.  What they got, of course, were platitudes, excuses, and specious anecdotes intended to demonstrate that the Telephone Company did, indeed, Care About the Rural Customer.  (Not that they actually did anything of the kind but, you know, they had to pretend.)

One of the attendees at the meeting was The Hon. Bob Poage, Congressman from the Eleventh District of Texas and an ardent advocate for rural farmers and ranchers.  Like a lot of his constituents, the Hon. Bob was pretty plain-spoken.  He sat there with the rest of the group, listening impatiently as the PR types went through their scripted song-and-dance yet again.  However, when one phone-o-crat tried to claim that Bell was actually Doing Something about the Needs of Rural Residents by pointing out that they’d just built a long-distance line connecting Waco with McGregor, about fifteen miles away (and just over fifteen miles from Crawford, Texas, now infamous because the Southwestern White House is there), Bob lost patience.

Shifting in his seat, he growled, “McGregor??  Who in the hell wants to call McGregor?”

So “who wants to call McGregor?” became our family’s code phrase for “Why in the world would anybody want to do that?”  Because none of us could ever think of any reason to call McGregor either.

The Legion of Doom must repossess the reformed flag from the Bat Cave.  Fnord.