(This story about Fred Koehler is copied from the June 1974 issue of Pacific Telephone Magazine under the original title "Those were the days, my friend.")

Ahh, the roaring twenties -- bootleg gin, flappers and oh, you kid! The world was young, America had emerged relatively unscathed from World War I, men were men and women were... interesting.

One man who remembers the way it was in the telephone business, and who did his own share of roaring in the twenties is Fred Koehler. Fred retired in 1963 as district construction superintendent in Fresno after 47 years of telephone work.

He's an insulator collector extraordinaire, as well as a veteran telephone man. Since many of his insulator-collecting colleagues don't have the skinny on the old days of the phone business, they besieged Fred with requests to put together a history.

He obliged, and the result was a notebook binder filled with history, memorabilia, snapshots, and anecdotes about the phone business in the early days, and Fred's association with it. It's our privilege to share some of Fred's reminiscences with ptm readers.

Fred came to work for Pacific Telephone in mid summer, 1918, in San Diego. He brought with him a couple of years of experience as a lineman with the Home Telephone Company and the San Diego Gas and Electric Company.

He says, "It's hard to believe in this day and age that there wasn't any transcontinental service before the year of 1915, but there wasn't. It you wanted to send a message east, you either trusted the U.S. mail or you sent a telegram."

Fred's book focuses on those years of great adventure in the telephone business, between 1920 and 1930, while the industry feverishly built open wire lines for long distance service.

Says Fred, "It was a great day when the transcontinental line went into service. You could make a call to New York from San Francisco for $15.00."

Right from the start, when Fred had his first job with the Home Telephone Company as a lineman, his ambition was to be a "boomer." He explains, "Boomers didn't always come from a ripsnorting mining community. The early day telephone, telegraph and power linemen who went from one job to another or from one job to another or from one company to another were dubbed floaters or boomers. They were top hands and went wherever they could get work."

Being a boomer was more than an occupation, it was a state of mind. "A boomer was the kind of man no one could push around. He drank his liquor raw, liked his women soft and pretty, and he asked no favors of anyone."

My first line truck, a 1912 Autocar, that hit 15 mph!

1915 Mack truck, near Paso Robles in 1918.

But the boomers were an endangered species, and progress and World War I just about put an end to their way of life. "After the war, some of the old-time boomers retired, some others stayed on, but companies began changing their hiring practices. Another species became extinct."

Koehler's story picks up in the year 1920 when telephone service and facilities were in great demand. He explains, "Radio broadcasting networks were coming into the picture, carrier circuits were making progress and all required more circuits. The old iron wire lines were not suitable to handle the new circuit requirements and they had to be replaced. And, the available copper circuits needed a lot of work. All these projects required the building up of large line crews."

Jobs were plentiful, according to Fred. "All qualified linemen around were hired, and still more were needed, so large groups of young men were hired and trained."

In the next 10 years, Fred worked on a number of open wire jobs from Los Angeles to San Diego, to Yuma, Arizona, to San Francisco, and from Sacramento to Reno, to Wendover, Utah, and back to Ely, Nevada.

The work required a variety of equipment and no sleek, yellow, white, and blue vans were yet available. "We used horse wagons, trucks, engines with flat cars, and sleds. I should mention that sled was man-powered, though the snow in the mountains might be 10 feet deep."

And, as the demand for more and more facilities kept growing, the crews had to contend with merciless Mother Nature "Winter storms, summer and fall fires, floods -- all caused open wire line failure that required many hours in overtime to get the lines back in service."

Though working on the floating line crew was a rough life, it obviously had a great deal of appeal for an adventuresome soul like Fred.

"Sometimes our work took us 30 to 50 miles from any town, so we set up large canvas tents for sleeping, eating and cooking quarters. The heating system during the winter was usually a pot-belly stove that burned wood or coal."

Sometimes the accommodations were a little classier. "On the large jobs in Nevada, camp trains were built on railroad cars, which were cabins constructed on a wagon frame."

Although the work was hard, the sporting spirit would crop up whenever there was an opportunity. In addition to being a lineman, Fred "Kid" Koehler was building up quite a reputation as a boxer. One newspaper account of a bout (which he won, of course) between him and another pugilist from Fresno reads:

"It is in the consensus of opinion among the fight followers that this was the best bout ever staged in El Centro. The two boys, evenly matched and ever eager to mix, exhibited wonderful stamina and their ability to give and take regular he-man wallops won the hearts of the fans and aroused their enthusiasm to such a pitch that towards the end of the contest the house was in one whale of an uproar."

Koehler's line crew stringing wire Sacramento to Reno, 1926.

1935, near Weed, on new route for transcontinental.

Some of the crew's recreation was a little more peaceful. "We always looked forward to Saturday night. Almost every town had a big dance which brought together the townspeople, cowboys, farmers and telephone hands. Everyone seemed to have a great time and the dance would carry on to the wee hours of the morning."

Frolicsome as the night before might be, the athletes on the crew would still be ready for yet another tradition the following day. "Most every town had a local baseball team, and many of the telephone men were good ball players. The games were usually played on Sunday and the town's folks really turned out to back their team."

Pranks were also an important part of the line crew's life. Fred reminisces about one. "It was the habit of the big boys in Los Angeles to send someone out to the field to be a crew's field clerk, if they were grooming him for bigger things. One time they happened to send us a rather sissified fellow."

Woe to the city slicker! As Fred tells it, "I'd been out quail hunting one day and I came across a rattler. One of the other guys caught it and put it in a can. He pulled the fangs out of it, which made it harmless. Then, before this sissy field clerk came to bed, the joker sneaked into his tent and put the defanged rattler in the bottom of the clerk's bed.

"It happened that I shared the tent with this poor fellow, and I heard him come in, get undressed, and get into bed. Next thing I knew, he let out a war whoop and ran out of the tent in nothing but his shorts. We finally calmed him down enough to tell us what happened. Well, the company got wind of this incident and that was the end of the instigator."

Getting ahead in the business was a little different procedure in those days. On-the-job training was the order of the day, and a fellow with a curiosity to learn more had to go after the learning on his own. "When I started out," says Fred, "the boss was the boss. He told you what to do, you were the workman and you never saw the specifications of a job."

But, youthful resourcefulness will always find a way. "We were doing camp jobs then, and I used to sneak into the boss's tent and take the specs out and study them and make notes. Nobody could figure out how I knew so much. Maybe it wasn't honest, but you had to get your education yourself, in those days, the hard way."

For luck, most crews had a mascot, usually a dog. But one crew, Fred remembers, had a billy goat for a mascot. "He'd ride on the cab of the truck, as if he owned it."

Working in the field often gave the men a unique look at the upper crust. "When I worked a crew in Hollywood, the stars would leave us a pair of slippers by the door, so we wouldn't come messing up their fancy carpets with our boots. It wasn't just us, though, the iceman, the plumber -- whoever came to call -- had to give up their boots."

Fred also remembers restringing line at the Hearst hideaway in Dunsmuir on the McCloud river when the family was ready to come up after the snow melted. "They always invited us in for lunch," he recollects. "They had a lot of chicken, I remember, and seems to me we got a lot of backs and wings."

Fred's fondest memory of the "good old days" was working as a foreman in Nevada. "I was a pretty good shot, so I'd go out and get wild game for the whole camp and we'd have a big blowout. And, there were all these mineral springs around, nice and hot. We'd just drive up, pull off our clothes and take a bath."

Working in Nevada had its drawbacks, however. "Some of the places we were working were 'dry.' But, somehow, in one location, the guys on the crew were getting the stuff from somewhere. They were coming to work pretty loaded and the camp foreman told us to find out where that stuff was coming from. Someone gave us a tip, and we found this old-timer who had tunneled way back in the mountains and he was making moonshine where the creek ran through. We worked out a little compromise with him. We promised not to tell the authorities if he'd stop selling to our guys. Since we moved on shortly after that, it wasn't a real hardship on anyone's side."

But, camp trains and the days of open wire lines were numbered. Construction slowed considerably early in the thirties when the depression gripped the country. And, after the economy cranked up again in the mid thirties, buried cable came to the forefront.

As Fred explains, "Open wire did have a final fling when, at the request of the United States government, an expedited line was built between Los Angeles and Portland."

Though the thirties signaled an end of one era in the telephone business and Fred's career, it did open another. In 1932, a perspicacious hotel owner in San Andreas introduced Fred to another of his guests, a young schoolteacher named Catherine. "I guess he figured a ball player as good as me would be quite a catch," says Fred. Catherine must have figured the same, for they were married later that year.

Forty-one years later, they're still together in the same house they purchased when they first moved to Fresno in 1941.

Although Fred can't resist regaling visitors and fellow insulator-collectors with some choice stories from the old days, it's obvious that he and Catherine live very much in the present.

Fred still hunts small game and Catherine goes with him. She doesn't shoot, but she's good company.

And, Fred still carves, a boyhood hobby he developed when he needed duck decoys and decided to make his own. And, both are insulator buffs, and the various shows and sales they attend all over the country have given them frequent opportunities to travel.

Home is still Fresno, a sunny house full of insulators, carvings, flowers, memories and two lively people undaunted by age and circumstance.

Their backyard is full of fruit trees, birds waiting in line at a homemade feeder, and lavishly blooming rosebushes.

This writer left the Koehlers' loaded with grapefruit, a wood carving of a friendly donkey, and a couple of insulators to launch us on our own collection. Though we missed the "good old days" of the business, we feel we shared in them just a little, by spending a morning with Fred and Catherine Koehler.