How Dad and ‘Ma Bell Taught Me to Embrace Innovation and Change

  By Susan MacLaughlin, Account Supervisor, Dallas

My Daddy works for Western, and my Mommy works for Bell.
Considering Divestiture, I think I turned out swell.
Introducing Susan Kathryn, the newest Baby Bell.

So read the first few lines of the birth announcement for a third generation telecom brat.

My PR career has allowed me to work with a variety of telecommunications and technology companies that talk in bits and bytes and mostly work in rather bland office suites. But through my family’s history with AT&T and the Bell System, I’ve had an up-close view of an industry that’s moved from clunky landline rotary phones to smart devices and from an intricate maze of wires and poles to the cloud. 

With rapid innovation, old technologies often fall by the wayside. For example, there’s no longer a need for the porcelain and glass insulators that my grandfather once installed on top of telephone poles (they sure are pretty, though). While this may be the case, my Dad taught me how to balance my love for the products and services I pitch today with the promise of future innovation.

While Dad was among the engineers who worked on innovations like digital electronic switching, the time he spent improving long distance service to the towns and cities where he grew up were a highlight of his career. Through his work with Western Electric, he and his team were responsible for the construction and maintenance of a network of microwave towers placed throughout the rolling hills of Western Wisconsin.  They didn’t look like much – squatty little concrete buildings with metal towers pointing toward the sky – and were often placed smack in the middle of cow pastures. But at the time, the technology was mesmerizing – especially for an old farm kid like my Dad. Rather than relying solely on lines to relay the call, the microwave towers created a high frequency path for communication, relaying the transmission through the air from one tower to another until it was finally switched into our local telephone office and from there, to customers’ homes. 

Dad loved those towers. He loved them so much that he even brought my Mom to see them when they went on dates. Romantic, right? The towers were a huge part of his life. And then, just as quickly as the towers went up, they became obsolete. By 1989, AT&T announced that it would retire all its analog transmission facilities.   

On the one hand, it could be really easy to say that the thousands of hours he spent constructing microwave towers were a waste. But over the course of many drives through rural Wisconsin, what my Dad taught me as we passed by those defunct towers is that while those structures were a huge part of his life, microwave towers were a necessary step between the lines and poles my grandfather installed and the more advanced innovations that drive the way we communicate today. In fact, Dad was able to take what he learned from working on those towers and apply it to a twilight consulting career with various spin-off companies in Dallas during the telecom boom.

Dad has been retired for years now, but his lessons remain true. While innovation can lead to moments of reflection and nostalgia, the evolution of technology is also a good part of what makes working with it so incredibly fun and rewarding. Technology companies, including many of our clients, are constantly updating and improving their offerings – to the extent that when we look back at our pitches 10 years from now, their products and services will likely seem as antiquated as a 1970s-era microwave tower. And you know, even if the products and services we currently work with are gone within a year, we’ll have developed critical knowledge and relationships to help us keep having fun with the client technologies of tomorrow.  I know I’m still having a ball, and I can’t wait to see what the next year brings.