The Alabama Telephone Company was an American independent telephone company in Northwest Alabama , operating in the mid-20th century and serving Pickens County , Fayette County , and the Haleyville area. At its peak, it was the largest telephone company in Alabama outside of the Bell System . It is best known for being the first telephone company in North America to implement 9-1-1 service.
4-605: The company was founded in 1938. In 1954, employees organized under the Communications Workers of America and held a strike for over a year. In the tenth month of the strike, the company headquarters was dynamited , in connection with a series of dynamite and shotgun attacks surrounding communication workers strikes throughout the Southern United States . The strike ended in August 1955 when
8-605: A national newspaper story about AT&T 's intent to build a 9-1-1 system, company president Bob Gallagher determined to implement the system himself. On February 16, the first 9-1-1 call in North America was placed by Alabama Speaker of the House Rankin Fite , with the phone answered by Tom Bevill at the Haleyville, Alabama police station. Alabama Public Service Commission director Bull Connor witnessed
12-578: The National Labor Relations Board ruled that a new election of non-striking employees should redetermine whether the company should be unionized; the union won the vote. In October, following the end of the strike, the exchange in Hamilton, Alabama was reduced to rubble by a dynamite attack. In 1966, it created a subdivision to sell cable television , which was contracted to Stromberg-Carlson . In January 1968, after reading
16-469: The call being answered. According to Gallagher, the motivation to beat AT&T to implementing 9-1-1 came from his father, a fire chief in West Virginia. However, the logic of having two villains of the civil rights movement as the first 9-1-1 dispatchers has been questioned. In 1975, it was purchased by Georgia State Telephone Company, which later became a subsidiary of Contel called "Contel of
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