Selkirk woman honoured by Town of Churchill
A retired Manitoba Telephone System operator who lives in Selkirk was honoured by the Town of Churchill for her dedication to keeping people in the north connected to each other and for wanting to make her own connection to the town.
Lorna Nohlgren, who will be turning 93, received a certificate of appreciation from Churchill Mayor Michael Spence when she travelled by train up to Churchill in August 2020 to fulfil one of the wishes on her bucket list.
Having grown up in the north and visited many parts of the region, Nohlgren said she had always wanted to see Churchill. She had no idea the town had been tipped off about her trip and was planning to honour her.
“I was totally surprised when I received the certificate. I wasn’t expecting that,” said Nohlgren, who has lived in Selkirk for 60 years, has been volunteering with the Gordon Howard Centre for older adults since 2005 and is an accomplished self-taught painter.
The three-day trip to Churchill was a Christmas gift from Nohlgren’s son, Bruce.
“Mom told me that while she’s still on this earth, she’d like to see Churchill. So that’s what I gave her for Christmas in 2019,” he said. “I knew the executive director of the Town of Churchill and told him about Churchill being on my mom’s bucket list and he said he would like to arrange a ceremony to honour her telecommunications service and interest in wanting to come to the community at 90 years old. It was arranged that the mayor would be there. Mom thought we were going for a walk around Churchill and wondered why I was taking her to the town office.”
Nohlgren’s 30-year telecommunications journey with MTS started in 1947 in The Pas, where she grew up. Her career then took her to Flin Flon farther north and concluded in Selkirk, where she moved with her husband in 1963. She began as a switchboard operator, connecting people in the region and beyond with one another, and was the first operator in The Pas who got paid for two weeks’ training.
Teenage boys were, historically, the first telephone operators. But they proved unruly at times, and women, who were naturally more polite, were pressed into service.
Switchboards connected different parts of a telephone system. Operators, who worked 24-7, would pull wires attached to a jack from one location on the switchboard and plug them into another location to connect calls. People with landline telephones (there were no cell phones back then) would call the switchboard and the operator would ask what number they wanted to ring.
“We connected mostly local calls but we had long distance calls also. We handled some personal calls, but a lot of residents couldn’t afford phones, so it was mostly businesses using the telephone,” said Nohlgren. “At that time (late ‘40s), there wasn’t even a direct circuit to Winnipeg; you had to go through Swan River and Dauphin to get to Winnipeg. And there was only one line to Flin Flon, Cranberry Portage, Wanless, Sherridon, Cold Lake, all on what was called the 31 Circuit. It was 1948 when MTS put a direct line into Flin Flon.”
There was also no MTS service to Churchill at that time, and operators had to use what was called the “iron line,” which was the telegraph service used by the Canadian National Railway.
After the Second World War, Churchill had a substantial miliary presence in town. In 1949 Nohlgren was told of one man was terribly homesick and she agreed to patch through a call from him to his parents in Quebec. That could have spelt the end of her career with MTS.
“He was really homesick. One of the Hudson’s Bay train engineers got talking to this fellow over the iron line and the engineer then phoned me at the switchboard and said, ‘Lorna, do you think you can do something for this fellow?’ I said, ‘What? The engineer says, ‘He’s so homesick, he’s young, his parents are in Montreal.’ I told him I’d patch the fellow through, but he was not to mention where he was calling from. I put him through as if he was calling from a hotel pay station in The Pas. And, of course, I said to the fellow, ‘As long as you call collect,’ which he did,” she said. “I would probably have lost my job. I don’t think they’d cut my pension now if they find out.”
Operators were not supposed to engage in idle chitchat with people calling in. Some people were “lonely” and wanted someone to talk to, she said. But one situation demanded she put workplace rules aside to help a young girl in distress.
“A young girl called in and told me she was going to commit suicide. I kept her talking on the line then I called my supervisor and she talked to the girl. I called the police and we kept this young girl on the line until the police got to her,” said Nohlgren, who had no formal training in emergency situations. “You were timed on your calls; you had to keep working steadily and not talk to people while you were on the switchboard other than to put them through.”
She said the police arrived at the scene, but she never found out what later happened to the girl.
It was in 1948 in Flin Flon where Nohlgren met her future husband, Gordon, who also worked for MTS and was installing a direct telephone line into the town. Chatting with operators was standard procedure.
“The first thing they’d do is get acquainted with the operators,” she said. “On Thursday afternoons the stores were closed and it was really quiet on the switchboard. Our boss gave us a job of cleaning the Venetian blinds. I went out the back and asked the [MTS] guys if there was a strong guy here who can take the blinds downs. A couple of them clamoured to get in. One of them was Gordon.”
Operators would also receive emergency calls for situations such as fires. In Flin Flon, for instance, they could activate a siren from the switchboard that would ring in town to alert the emergency services. Nohlgren found out the hard way one day at work what the siren switch did. She opened a door to the control because she was “curious” as to what it was.
“When I slammed the door shut, it started to ring. It rang and rang and rang. I had to call in and say, ‘Oh, it was an accident,’” she said, laughing.
The public back then were a nicer lot to operators, very respectful and quite generous at Christmas, loading them down with chocolate and fruitcake.
“One outfit gave us a crisp dollar bill – and that was a lot of money then,” said Nohlgren.
After moving to Selkirk in the early ‘60s, Nohlgren said she took a part-time operator job and also trained to be a radio operator to connect people across the region who didn’t have MTS service.
“We had a few consoles of radio connection to all the places that didn’t have phones like Berens River and George Island, where a guy would call in the weather every four hours and we’d patch him through to Winnipeg to the weather station. All those places – which now have phones – were on the northern radio service,” said Nohlgren. “I was the first female voice on the radio that they connected to Norway House just so they could see how a female voice carried.”
Growing up in The Pas was like growing up in other rural Manitoba towns. Nohlgren said as a girl she joined Brownies and Girl Guides, skated, curled and joined the junior and senior choir at church. Her parents also took them on trips.
“Our parents took us out to Clearwater Lake about 25 miles away,” she said. “They would rent a cottage and take us out there for a month in the summer.”
She travelled as far as the Nelson River near Gillam when she around 12 years old. Her uncle worked for the railway at the time and she and her family were able to “borrow” a pump car to travel from Gillam to the mouth of the Nelson River, have lunch and come back. Pump cars were called handcars. They had a small platform that could accommodate three or four people and are powered by the passengers themselves, who work an arm in seesaw fashion, pulling up and pushing down to propel the car along the rails.
Nohlgren’s train trip to Churchill a few years ago was much more comfortable than travelling by handcar. True to her pioneering spirit, and knowing the vast distances between communities in the north, Nohlgren said she bagged up sandwiches and made six dozen cookies to speed them along to a destination she had once connected over the wires.
