Tom Wraight stopped by and gave me more information on the barbed wire phone lines.
Apparently they were still in use into the 1950s in the Glengile area.
He remembers that the Ed Nelson household had two phones, one hooked to the barbed wire line, and the other to the ‘high line’. People on the barbed wire line would phone the Nelson house to get a message passed on to someone on the ‘high line’ and visa versa.
Ed and Mathilda Nelson moved to town in 1952 and Tom isn’t sure how they worked it after that but he thinks it is possible that the barbed wire was used up to 1965 at which time the phone lines were dug in underground.
On May 17, 1965 there was a horrendous snowstorm that destroyed most of the phone lines and the government replaced all the lines in the area with underground lines at that time.
Thanks Tom, your feedback is greatly appreciated.
The words that were used in The Review during the early issues have me puzzled. ‘Scavenger’, for instance, had me stumped.
I read it first in a Town Council report printed in the September 16, 1915 issue of The Review.
“C. C. Chriest, the scavenger, was present and intimated to the council that unless the town was prepared to increase his salary to $125 per month, he was ready to tender his resignation.”
This raise in pay was granted very quickly. $125 per month was a high wage for the times and I couldn’t figure out what kind of work a ‘scavenger’ would be doing for the Town.
Then I found an article printed in the mid twenties saying that the scavenger program was being dropped and went on to describe the proper size of the hole people would need to dig under their outhouses.
Light bulb! This could only mean that the scavenger was what is otherwise known as ‘the honey bucket man’. The man who had the job of emptying the pails, or buckets, from the outhouses.
Talk about a crappy job.
No wonder he got his raise. Worth every penny.
Thanks for the bouquet Jean, it turned a good day into a great day.

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