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"Winter Wonderland in Warren District"
Article from The Telephone News April 1947 by David H. Dumigan, Assistant Editor

Anyone who has ever lost his heart to wild, rugged natural beauty would fall in love at once with the stately grandeur of Warren District in Northwestern Pennsylvania.  For, whether the mountains and valleys are blanketed with a mantle of sparkling white or dressed in summer finery of green and white and pink, they inspire the imagination, and defy the vocabulary to describe their magnificence.

Beautiful scenery is everywhere in the territory. To the north and west are farms and orchards and vineyards.  The world-renowned Pennsylvania oil fields occupy the central section.  Dairy farms and vast potato fields share the area to the east with the famous Black Forest, where nimrod or angler will find a veritable sportsman's paradise.  And toward the south are bituminous coal mines.  Wherever you go in the territory, people can be seen wresting raw materials and agricultural products from Mother Earth.

Warren, as I saw it in March, was a winter wonderland--beautiful to look at and cold as an iceberg.  Nature was on a rampage when I stepped from the train at Port Allegany into a driving snowstorm.

"I was expecting a telephone man from Coudersport, but I doubt if he'll make it across the mountains in a storm like this," I confided to the station agent.  "Do you mean Red Chitester?" he asked.  I assured him that I did.  "Then relax, mister," he advised.  " People in these parts don't bother much about weather.  If Red is to meet you, he'll be here, storm or no storm."

He was right, for in a few minutes I was thawing out in the warm handclasp of Palmer (Red) Chitester, Combination Man from Coudersport.  Whether he drove the 20 miles back to Coudersport by instrument or by intuition, I don't know.  For in the driving snow and murky darkness I could see no further ahead than the front of his truck.  But he just laughed when I mentioned hazardous driving conditions, and assured me that everything would be all right.  "If you came up here for a deep-freeze treatment, you sure picked the right time," he told me the following morning.  He wasn't fooling.  I was cold-soaked for a week.  But I learned to use snowshoes.  I learned a lot about the territory.  I learned how people in isolated and snowbound sections of the Alleghenies depend on good telephone service for their comfort and their contact with the outside world.  And I learned why the station agent in Port Allegany was confident that Red would meet me-storm or no storm.

Nature ran wild during my stay in Warren District.  It blew zero most of the time.  But, when you hobnob with a telephone crowd like they have in that territory, you forget about the cold.  And you thrill with knowledge that you're part of the same outfit when you see the fellowship existing between people in the District and men like Red.  He's as much a part of the area he serves as the air he breathes.  He realizes the stake he has in maintaining the kind of telephone service that will insure their comfort and progress.  And they are confident that, when they need his help, he'll get there-storm or no storm.

But towns and communities and people in the Warren District are located sometimes miles apart.  Unlike the comforts enjoyed by those who live in metropolitan areas, those of the people in this territory are very meager.

If danger threatens or sickness prevails, they can't summon aid by going across the street for a physician, or travel a short distance to a fire house or a police station. They can't call across an areaway to a friend, or shop at a corner store. They depend almost entirely on the telephone.

Miles of cable and open wire parallel the main highways and cut their way through some of the most desolate sections of the Alleghenies.  Sturdy poles are set back from the main roads to insure their safety from the accidents of vehicular traffic.  Where pole lines penetrate wooded sections of the territory, the poles are girdled with metal band to prevent porcupines from climbing them and feasting on the lead cable sheath.

Oh, yes, animal and birds of the forest give Combination Men many a headache.  Because vegetation is scarce, crows will use pieces of old fence wire, or anything else they can find, to build nests on poles.  The wire sometimes will rub on regular telephone wires and cause trouble.  Bees and woodpeckers will commandeer cable terminal boxes, and, on occasion, flying birds will become entangled in wires and cause all sorts of trouble.

But when ice and snow cover the territory, the Combination Man has his toughest job.

On many of the jobs I covered with Red we plowed over snowbound roads until our muscles ached.  Soft snow waited to bury us waist deep if we lost a snowshoe.  Driving sleet cut into our eyes and tried to glue the eyelids together.  My teeth did their best to knock each other loose from the bridgework.  But it was always the same story--Red would stoke his pipe, take a hitch in his belt and say, "Let's go--they're expecting us."

I was cold, sure.  But I came back with a better understanding of what "The Spirit of Service" is; and what the faithful, unselfish service of telephone people means to those who have implicit faith in our loyalty.

Pictures (coming) show some of the contacts made by Combination Men like Palmer (Red) Chitester in a district where 9,140 square miles of territory is squeezed into a single community by a telephone network that penetrates to the most remote and sparsely settled sections of the Alleghenies in Northwestern Pennsylvania.