The North Dakota Association of Telephone Cooperatives is a organization almost half a century old that prospers because of the simple eloquence of its original mission and the recognition by its members the Association must evolve as the needs of its member companies and subscribers "at the end of the line" continue to change.

Directors from nine of eleven North Dakota telephone cooperatives met at the Patterson Hotel in Bismarck in March of 1953 to "guard against unfavorable legislation, exchange information among the members and promote the general welfare of telephone cooperatives to the end that adequate and economical communications systems be made available to all residents of North Dakota." Much of the original incorporators’ mission statement remains as the bedrock of what the Association is called upon to do today, although the challenges and opportunities in this century would be incomprehensible to those that preceded us in the industry.

We are mindful, however, that many of the issues those far-sighted men and women faced were equally, if not more so, daunting in that day and age. In 1950, the Rural Electrification Administration sent two teams of engineers to North Dakota to assess the feasibility of telephone projects in the State. Their assessment was that it could not be done. There were just too few people spread too thinly across the State.

It is important to appreciate the state of rural telephony in this nation and in North Dakota in that day and age to appreciate the significance of the achievement of telephone cooperatives and the independent telephone industry. To illustrate the sorry state of telecommunications in rural America, Mr. Donnell Haugen, a early director of Reservation Telephone Cooperative in Parshall, North Dakota testified before the United States Senate Agricultural Appropriations Committee in 1953. Mr. Haugen told members of the Senate that only about half the rural population in America had any telpehne servi e and less than twenty-five percent of rural people had satsfactory service. Because of the depression in the 1930's fewer farmers had telephone service in 1940 than there had been in 1920.

In 1950, North Dakota had about 120,000 telephones. Of that number, 91,000 served the larger cities and were owned by five companies, including Northwestern Bell Telephone. Of the remaining 29,000 telephones in North Dakota, 17,000 were owned by 114 telephone companies which operated 140 exchanges. The other 11,000 telephones were operated by over 700 stock companies.

A book by the name of "Talking Wires" was published in the mid-1970's and chronicles the history of rural telephony in North Dakota. Its authors noted that many of the small telephone companies were family operations consisting of a single exchange which served a rural community. In most of these cases, the wives would operate the switchboards in their homes and the husbands would take care of line maintenance. The stock companies generally were farmer-owned lines where anywhere from three to thirty farmers might put up enough money to install a telephone line connecting their farms. By 1950, virtually all of these farmer lines were connected to switchboards in nearby towns, but it was not uncommon for telephone lines to connect a handful of farmers and provide for no telephone contact with the outside world.

We tend to think of our world much different today, but in many ways the challenges and battles that we fight are eerily similar to those faced by the pioneers of rural telephony fifty years ago. While a half a century ago we debated how to bring telephone service to the most remote, least populated areas of our State, today we have those same discussions on how to deliver broadband capability and high-speed services to those same customers. In the public policy arena, whether it be Federal or here in North Dakota, there is every bit the need today as there was in 1953 to tell our story, but more importantly, the story of those hard working men and women at "the end of the line" who created a telephone company for themselves because no one else would and use it today because it is the vehicle that best meets their telecommunications needs.