Dial B for Betsy
Written by jaron Summers © 2025
Seventy-five years ago, I lived in a charming Canadian prairie village named Coronation, population 950, not counting chickens.
We had one school, one cop, and one woman who knew everything. Her name was Betsy, and she was our town’s telephone operator—long before “tech support” was a thing.
Our family phone was a wooden contraption mounted on the kitchen wall. It had a crank handle and a receiver that smelled faintly of linseed oil and other people’s secrets. When I got home from school, I’d pick up the receiver and give it a crank or two.
Instantly, Betsy would answer. “Hi, Jaron—home early from school?”
Of course, she already knew the answer. She always knew the answer. She was a walking, jingling human switchboard with a memory longer than the Canadian winter and more accurate than a Google search. Her brain was somehow networked to every conversation, grocery list, romance, and gossip strand in Coronation.
“I’m looking for my mother.”
“Probably at Price’s Food Market. Back of the store. They just got a shipment of bananas and your Mom is making pies for Mrs. Noonan’s birthday. I think your mother’s wearing that new brown coat.”
And she’d be right.
My father paid about three dollars a month for that kind of cutting-edge telecommunications. That price included access to Betsy’s uncanny predictive powers, her encyclopedic memory, and yes, her eavesdropping.
You see, Betsy listened in on every single phone call. This wasn’t a conspiracy theory—it was a community tradition. We all knew she did it because we could hear her necklace jingling as she leaned in to listen. That necklace was a dead giveaway—like a cat with a cowbell trying to sneak up on a canary.
Outsiders didn’t always understand. Some city folks moved to Coronation, made a phone call or two, and suddenly Betsy knew their maiden names, bank balance, and what they’d paid for their used Pontiac.
They’d storm into Billy James’ office—the local lawman, furniture reseller, and part-time marriage counselor—demanding action.
But Billy wasn’t about to shut Betsy down. She knew who he was seeing on the side.
Complaints stopped at his desk.
Today, we have “smart” phones—sleek, overpriced little rectangles that promise connection but can’t tell you where your mother is unless she’s strapped to a GPS ankle monitor.
For over a thousand bucks, you get apps that crash, spam calls from robots pretending to be the IRS, and digital assistants that respond to “Hey Siri” with “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that.”
Betsy never missed a thing. She was our town’s search engine, social network, life coach, and warning system, all rolled into one sensible pair of orthopedic shoes.
No update required.
And if you ever dared scream at her or were mean to her son, Kenny … well, let’s just say if your outhouse caught on fire, you might not be able to reach Roy Reiffenstein the chief of the volunteer fire department. . Betsy didn’t just know things. She remembered who was unkind.
In the age of bots and clouds and buzzwords, I still think the best “tech” I ever encountered was a woman with a party line, a steel trap memory, and a necklace that told on her.
We didn’t need passwords back then.
We had Betsy.
