Former telephone operator wants to connect people once again This time, she hopes it's her former colleagues she reaches By Monique Balas News-Chronicle It's been 50 years since Joyce Janus has been able to reach out and touch her old co-workers as an operator with Wisconsin Bell Telephone Co. That's why Janus has arranged for a reunion for any former Wisconsin Bell employees, just to get back in touch and see what everyone has been up to. The 50th anniversary of the day direct dial came to Green Bay was a good excuse for a party. "I just think the sharing of memories and the camaraderie that we formed, we were like one big family - it's sad that we lost touch," Janus said. "It was just so much fun working there and everybody got to know each other." She said it's hard to keep in touch with people, because many of the women who got married now have different names. Janus herself, who worked at the company in 1952 and 1953, said she met her husband, Leo, through Ed Grzybowski, another Wisconsin Bell employee. "I'm sure most of us haven't seen each other for a long time," she said. "A lot of those people I probably haven't seen for 50 years, you don't know how to contact them." When phone dial capability was introduced on Dec. 12, 1953, Janus and her fellow operators all lost their jobs because there was no longer a need for an operator to connect people. She wants to be able to share some of the memories she has that still make her smile, such as the time workers went on strike and the men in high-level management had to serve as operators for a while. "They didn't know what they were doing," she said, laughing. "Then another thing that we always talk about is the payphones. We used to be trained, if you were on the shift where you had to answer payphones, you had to know the sound of the coin that dropped." Sometimes people would try to trick them by putting pennies into the slot. What would a good operator say to that? "'I'm sorry, can't put your call through,'" Janus said. Janus also enjoyed recounting a trick she played with fellow operators one Sunday during a Green Bay Packers game. They were all plugged into the radio listening to the game until a supervisor told them to unplug. To rebel, Janus and her co-workers answered the phone saying "bumble bees" instead of "number, please." "Not one person ever caught that," she said. Janus has stayed in telephone work throughout her life. After leaving Wisconsin Bell and getting married, she became a switchboard operator at other companies and currently works as a part-time receptionist at WLUK. She's also a member of PBX Telecommunicators Club. She hopes her old friends will call either her or her co-chairwoman, Ione Gogan, to attend the event, and she's crossing her fingers she'll get about 50 people to attend. It will be held at the Holiday Inn, a popular meeting place for Wisconsin Bell women. They'll have a cod or chicken dinner and the Baylander Quartet singing telephone-themed songs. "I just thought, it's 50 years, we can't let this go by," Janus said. "We would be able to share some of the crazy stories."