Museum curator spreads word about telecommunication history

BY TIM FARLEY

George Gibson never met Alexander Graham bell, but he’s certainly trying to preserve a semblance of the equipment and legacy the innovating pioneer created.

Gibson, curator of the Oklahoma Museum of Telephone History located at 111 Dean A. McGee, wants Oklahomans and out-of-town visitors to understand the background of the telecommunications industry. He’s also on a mission to help youngsters realize there were forms of telephones, equipment and companies that predated the cell phone industry.

Most people born after 1995 probably have never seen a rotary phone or a switchboard that transferred telephone calls from one destination to another, he said.

When a group of elementary-age students arrived at the museum for a field trip, one student asked Gibson if he knew “Mr. Bell.” Gibson laughed and told the student he never had the pleasure.

The museum is comprised of telephone equipment, switchboard operator mannequins, switchboards, telephone poles and wires, rotary and touchtone phones and much more.

“The museum allows people to see what it looked like decades ago,” Gibson said. “You can touch things, touch the old phones and listen to a dial tone. These types of things should be part of a student’s education. It’s part of

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Oklahoma and American history.”

The museum exhibits belong to a group known as the Telephone Pioneers, people who retired from Southwestern Bell and related companies. Most of the equipment on display was brought to Oklahoma City from Dallas.

Unfortunately, the number of museum visitors has dwindled since the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020.

“The number of people coming is very low,” Gibson said. “We do have some home-schooled students or people read about it on the web and they’ll come in, and we do get some downtown workers but that’s gone down with people working from home.”

The museum is open on Monday and Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Admission is free.

Only three other telephone museums exist in the United States, including the original Bell museum in Boston, MA. The others are in Portland, OR, and Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Gibson started his work with Southwestern Bell as an engineer in the early 1960s. During the summer of 1961, he moved temporarily to New York where he was instructed to write a data systems training for other employees. Later in his career, he was transferred to Cooperstown, N.Y., the site of the Baseball Hall of Fame. While working there, Gibson also played amateur baseball for the Cooperstown Indians which competed against other small-town teams. Gibson, a pitcher, played college baseball before beginning his career in the telecommunications industry.

Gibson, now 89, remains active in sports, playing tennis and golf regularly at The Greens Country Club in Oklahoma City. Gibson, who retired 35 years ago, reached the rank of vice president of network operations for Oklahoma and was assistant to the president for Southwestern Bell. His career also included moves to Arkansas and Missouri. n