We’ll Miss Billy Chandler at MonCre
Congratulations on a well deserved retirement
It began in 1960 when Billy Ferrell Chandler was hired on at MonCre for a dollar an hour.
The telephone company’s mandate fifty years ago was simple: get phone service into the rural area. But the job would prove more than tough, and making phone service happen meant doing what was necessary. The job of setting 40-foot long telephone poles upright was physically difficult. The poles weighed as much as, and moved like, the rigid tree trunks from which they were struck. The creosote poles were designed to support the ‘twisted pairs’ – the heavy, coiled copper wires, which were thick and always unwieldy. It was the lineman who, often by force and sheer determination, would set the wire in place.
Not unlike a mountain climber, a lineman utilized the steel cleats on his boots to notch the wood as he ascended the pole and to anchor himself at his tasks about ground. It was a balancing act, juggling the tools in hand with the tools on his belt, while strapped to the pole by a sliding leather strip, fastened by a single buckle.
More often than not, weather was an enemy. Heat and cold could be harsh and a whispering wind wanted no part in the competition a phone service would bring.
Such was the job that the 20 year old Billy Chandler signed on to do, and it would be almost 15 years before the poles would be replaced with underground cable, and the activities of his daily work would change. It was to be a while, too, before sophisticated equipment and communication would permit a project to be finished more efficiently and more safely.
Billy was born in Crenshaw County in 1940. It was a time when doctors were scarce, and it was common for midwives to help in the delivery of the babies. He grew up in Shady Grove and met and married a young woman there, who was susceptible to Billy’s easy smile and dimpled cheeks. Her name was Julia Nell Fannin, and she later became a well-known and respected school teacher at the former Montgomery County High School.
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