Ambassador Hotel 1968 Switchboard
Q. Would the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles used a switchboard in 1968 for its incoming and outgoing telephones calls to connect to the rooms?
A. (Tom Farley) Most probably, yes, they would have had a manual switchboard well into the 70s. Computerized telephone switching for companies was still quite expensive at that time. And the lack of personal service would have been a strike against the equipment at a first class hotel. That's my best guess, I would be amazed if this wasn't true.
A. (J.R. Snyder Jr.) (internal link) The first paid job I had was working at the Scottsdale Hilton when I was 14, answering the manual cord switchboard for a few hours after school. My mother was the front offfice manager. They needed help while people were checking in, I got paid something like 50 cents an hour.
About four years later, around '73 or so, I was already at the phone company and my mother had become the General Manager (quite a coup for a woman) of the entire property. The hotel, owners, management, staff and regular guests, were in quite a tizzy about the old switchboard being taken out.
They were replacing it with a direct to the rooms PBX {private branch exchange, ed.] and it was sort of like them taking exchange names away. A lot of people thought it was impersonal. My mother's point of view was pure business (my mother is English and has little romance for these things) and thought the whole uproar was ridiculous. She didn't have to pay two switchboard operators and time and charges were automatic and almost indisputable.
I remember Zsa Zsa Gabor being cheap, cheap, cheap. She demanded flowers and fruit baskets (gratis) and denied every call she ever made and they just wrote them off to get her out of the lobby. The hotel Bob Crane was murdered in, which was pretty classy at the time, was about a mile away.
I do remember as a kid when we travelled a lot hating to have to use the phone because you had to go through a switchboard operator who KNEW you were "that kid" in XYZ room with his parents.