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About Enginuity Communications

Incorporated in 2001, Enginuity Communications is a privately held company founded on the principal of building successful relationships with customers, employees and business associates in order to provide innovative and intelligent solutions at the network edge. Enginuity’s broadband and legacy interface products are deployed by major North American telcos and are built to withstand the rigorous requirements of service provider environments.

In today’s cost driven environment, businesses typically value their success with only financial measures. At Enginuity Communications, we value our success with relationships; relationships with our customers, our employees, and our business associates. We are dedicated to our unique model of professionalism built on a foundation of integrity, cooperation and trust, and achieving limitless synergy in all of our business endeavors.

Enginuity Communications is comprised of industry veterans who bring a wealth of experience, knowledge, and customer awareness to develop innovative and intelligent solutions that address the traditional and evolving telecommunication network.

History

Enginuity has a rich history that spans over nine decades. This family-run business has a legacy of dedication and hard work, with multiple generations having been involved in the industry. The story of Enginuity begins with a 60-year-old employee, who reminisces about their 40-plus years in the telecom field. Their first introduction to the world of telecommunications was as a summer hire at Southwestern Bell Telephone Company (SWBT) in 1975. However, their connection to the industry extends far beyond that, with their father, mother, grandmother, and other relatives having also worked for the company.

Steve Todd, Enginuity’s CEO, shares a vivid memory of visiting a telephone building at 308 South Akard St. in downtown Dallas (now 3 Bell Plaza) in the late 1950s. His mother, who had worked as a telephone operator for a decade before his birth, brought them to the building to meet his father, a switchman working in the central office at the time.

Steve recalls the distinct scent of the old central office buildings, which were built to be indestructible and served as designated fallout shelters in case of a nuclear attack. The smell of massive cables, intricate coated twine, relay racks, and electromechanical switches left a lasting impression.

In May 1980, Steve was promoted to their first management job at SWBT, entering the same lobby where he had been with his parents two decades earlier. The unique scent of the old switching office remained unchanged, a testament to the longevity and resilience of the company.

Fast forward to today, the company continues to use the same timely principles of old-school telephone companies as its foundation for reliable products and stellar customer support.

Nine Decades: One Family's Memories of Ma Bell

written by steve Todd, CEO for ISE September 2017

I turned 60 a couple of months ago. It’s hard to believe…I don’t feel like 60, but when I reflect back on the 40-plus years I’ve worked in telecom it seems more like a hundred years of memories. In a way, I guess it is. I started working for Southwestern Bell Telephone Company (SWBT) as a summer hire in about 1975, but my father and mother, my grandmother, and some great-aunts, uncles, and cousins had all worked there before me. I guess in a way I’ve been in telecom my whole life — and then some.

It is surprising how a unique sound or a scent can transport you to a place and time far from where you are today. My first memory of being in a telephone building was at 308 South Akard St. in downtown Dallas (now 3 Bell Plaza) in about 1959-60.

My mother (who left her job after 10 years as a telephone operator when I was born) drove us down to meet my father at work. He was a switchman working in the central office there at that time, and he came down to the building lobby to meet us.

There is a distinct scent to the old telephone central office buildings — they were built to be indestructible and at one time served as designated fallout shelters in case of a nuclear attack — and the massive cables brought into the cable vaults, the intricate coated twine Western Electric used to lash the cables throughout the offices, and the relay racks and bays of electromechanical switches — all combined to form a unique scent that made an impression on a 4 year old boy.

Ma-Bell-group-photo
Telephone Exhibit, State Fair of Texas
Dallas, 1956.
1956-Bobby-Todd
Bobby J. Todd, Switchman
State Fair of Texas, Telephone Exhibit, 1956

Some 20 years later in May, 1980, when I was promoted into my first management job at SWBT, I entered that same lobby to meet the personnel manager to give me my first assignment, and I remembered the unique scent of the old switching office when I was there. I remember it still.

My father, Bobby Jack Todd, was what we called an ‘old school’ telephone man. He started working outside in construction as a lineman’s helper right out of high school in 1946, and spent time at virtually every technical job in the company by the time he was promoted into management in the early 1960’s.

In truth, he started working for Ma Bell more than 10 years earlier, about 1934, when my grandmother got a job as THE telephone operator in Anna, Texas, about 20 miles north of Dallas. The great Depression was in full force, and that job really helped pull them through.

The telephone office of that time was actually the front room of a house…the kitchen was in back, and they lived and worked at the telephone office. Those were the days when you had the old cranks on the phone instead of a dial or dialpad. If you wanted to make a call, you’d spin the crank to charge a magneto, and it would turn on a light and a buzzer at the ‘cord board’ at the central station. The operator (Christine, my grandmother) would answer, and you would tell her who you wanted to call, and she’d ‘patch you through’ by connecting the cord coming from your cable pair to the recipient, and a bell would ring on their end. When they answered, the operator would drop off the line.

The telephone operators of the day knew everything happening in town…

When Christine was in the kitchen, my father or grandfather would catch the lights and buzzers and patch the calls through. Dad was 7 years old when they moved into that building.

Julia Christine Todd at the old cord board 
Anna, Texas circa 1934

chief-operators-and-service-assistants
Chief Operators and Service Assistants
Denison, Texas, 1947

Back row: Elsie Gray, Christine Todd, Ada Posey, Durelle Sharp, Alice Ivie
Front Row: Ludy Cantrell, Mildred Price, Maebelle Howard, Carrie Mae Mathis, Lily Hairsine

Sometime around 1940, the family moved up to Denison, Texas, near the Oklahoma border. A lot of business came through the Katy Railroad in the day, and it was a busy town. My grandmother became the assistant chief operator (see inset picture; note all of the operators in the background), and it gives you some idea of how labor-intensive running the telephone business used to be.

That little office was a 24-hour a day operation, with a lot of operators and technicians to support them. After my grandmother retired in about 1964, I learned that many of their friends that I came to know as a small boy were operators, technicians and managers that all used to work together. (This caused me a bit of embarrassment one occasion years later)

Somewhere along the line, my grandmother became very involved with the union. She became a union officer, and steward, and was devoted to their cause. She took trips down to Dallas, Ft. Worth, St. Louis, and all the way up to Illinois and Ohio to attend union functions in the 1940’s and 50’s. I remember her talk a lot about the big strike from March 7 through May 17, 1947. WWII had just ended, and I’m sure a lot of sacrifices were made over those years. They struck about 10 weeks asking for a $2/day raise, plus and to get health insurance for the first time. (See inset picture walking the picket line and after the strike ended). They finally got the company to concede to their cause, and my grandmother was very proud of that.

strikers
Left to Right:
Christine Todd, Ms. Krat, Ms. Rothner
Back to work in front of the telephone building
Denison, Texas May 17, 1947
Meeting of the National Federation of Telephone Workers
Adolphus Hotel in Dallas, taken in 1947

My grandmother, Julia Christine Todd is indicated by the arrow in the lower right of the photograph. She was a union organizer, steward, and local VP of the union in the Dennison Texas area north of Dallas.

People forget how many telephone operators there were at AT&T, but there were hundreds of thousands of them across the country.

I am impressed by how formal everything was in those day.

First known as the National Federation of Telephone Workers, the union became the Communications Workers of America in 1947.

Also in 1947, my parents got married, and my mother, Betty, got a job as an operator in Denison while my father worked as a lineman’s helper. I think it was mostly a prosperous time for America, and for the telephone companies, too. I think my parents combined paychecks were about $35/week…so that gives you some idea of what prosperous meant after the war. My dad served in the army for two years during the Korean war and then returned to SWBT and a transfer to Dallas.

Operator services at work, circa 1950…
somewhere in north Texas

In about 1961, we moved east to Longview, Texas and my dad took a job as a test desk technician. The test centers of the time (referred to as the “testboard”) were in the basement of most local telephone offices. At the Plaza office in Longview (see picture), I used to get to go to work sometimes with my dad.

I remember walking past the big battery arrays in the basement on the way to the testboard. The testboards looked similar to a group of cordboards — all large wooden cabinets with plugs and

switches…but also meters to measure voltages and the like. There was one test position that was spare and not hooked up to anything.

As long as I was quiet, they would let me sit at the testboard with my own headset, and I would flip the switches and pretend to be a telephone man. I was about 6 years old at the time. The test board supervisor was a man named Don Bell, and about 25 years later, I also worked for him as a young manager at the test center at 4100 Bryan St. in Dallas.

Clipping from the local paper
The main telephone office in background.
Longview, TX, circa 1962.
Bobby Todd at the office, about 1971
Ft Worth, Texas

My father got his first management job as a ‘wire chief’ in Mineola, Texas. He was in craft jobs for almost 20 years before his first management job, and he had worked as a lineman’s helper, lineman, cable splicer, switchman, an test desk technician…and probably more that I don’t recall. He had literally grown up in a telephone office, so he really knew just about every job in the telephone company by the early 1960’s. I was in first or second grade when he got his first management job, and we moved to a new town just about every year after that until I was in high school. The first and second level management jobs of the day were “chiefs”… wire chief, equipment chief, assignment chief, etc…), and eventually we got to Ft. Worth, Texas, in about 1971, where he was District Manager — Ft Worth & Suburban-Construction, where he stayed until his retirement in 1981. In this job, he was responsible for construction in the Ft. Worth metro and rural areas of north Texas from Wichita Falls east to Texarkana. Dallas metro was its own district, and at the time his peer in Dallas was a man named Ed Whitacre.

I remember coming home from school one day around 1973 or so, and my father called the house from a golf course in east Ft Worth. A cable had been cut west of Ft Worth and he had to head straight out to the site, so could I come give Mr. Whitacre a ride back to his car at the SWBT work center in Bedford, which I did. I distinctly remember the day, because later that night he told me “that man will be the president of SWBT some day” …and some 20 years later, he was.

I think the biggest challenge in my father’s career came on April 10, 1979, known as ‘Terrible Tuesday’, when a massive F4 tornado swept through Wichita Falls, Texas, killing some 68 people. It was devastating, and one of the worst tornado disasters in US history. There were many tornados spawned in the storm, but the biggest was over a mile wide as it tore through the city. Damage was over $800,000,000 in today’s dollars, and the devastation was widespread.

Dad and one of his area managers, Jerry Lemons, were east of where the storm hit at a job site at the time. As word of the damage quickly spread, they headed straight into Wichita Falls as the remnants of the storm passed over them.

A command center was quickly established for the massive restoration, and Southwestern Bell sent crews from all over into the devastated area to restore services. Dad was there for months, and when it was all finished, they had put up almost 40 miles of new cable and nearly 1,000 new poles to restore services.

Soon after this, and as the divestiture of the Bell operating companies was approaching, my father could see the big changes ahead and elected to take his retirement in 1980, just as I was moving into my first management job.

So, in May of 1980 when I left the personnel office at the 308 S Akard building downtown, my first management assignment was as a frame supervisor in the far north Dallas suburb of Richardson. It was a long commute from my house, so I left home very early the next day and wound up standing in the lobby of the district office around 7am. A group or perhaps a dozen or so clerks and technicians were standing in the lobby having coffee or a cigarette in the last few minutes before they started their workday.

As a very young manager, I was nervous already, but introduced myself to the group, who were all very polite. And then two of the older clerks from the assignment office, hearing my last name, soon made the connection to the days they worked as operators with my grandmother. It was a bit embarrassing as they recollected seeing me as a toddler at about the same time my new district manager walked into the lobby.

I stayed with SWBT through divestiture until 1988, and then left to pursue opportunities in our industry designing and manufacturing products for the network. Today, as I approach my retirement years it’s been a privilege to look back through nine decades of pictures and share memories of one family’s contributions to a piece of our heritage. As the years have passed, technology has changed fabric of our network and the way we communicate in so many ways, and the new technology just keeps on coming. But as I look at that picture of my grandmother sitting at the cord board in 1934, I know that one thing has never changed. It’s always been about bringing people together.

And as I look down the hall from my office and see one of my daughters, a young engineer in our industry, I wonder what she’ll remember forty years from now.