Western Electric Company
[Editor's note: At the height of its growth the Bell System employed over one million people, employing them in thousands of different jobs. E-mail me if you would like to tell your story here. Independent telephone employees are also welcome, indeed, it is much more difficult to get information on the work the Independents did than with Bell.]
Work at WECO's Refurbishing Plant in the early 1970s, by Frank Harrell
Frank's site is here: http://nps-vip.net/
I worked for the C&P Telephone company in Northern Virginia in the early 1970s. (C&P stands for The Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company.) Specifically I worked within the Western Electric refurbishing plant near the Pentagon which is now a Costco, a large, warehouse type department store. We processed all the phone equipment that was removed from houses and businesses within the C&P area, that being the District of Columbia, Virginia, Maryland, West Virginia, and Delaware.
The phones would be dumped on a conveyer and we had to pick each one up, check its type number and color, sort them to specific chutes, then match them to a computer punch card. They then went to Western Electric for cleaning and repair. Equipment other than the standard phones, were handled in separate areas. We swapped work positions around every week. We processed an average of 14,000 phone sets a day. Terrible job. Let me first talk about the building itself, and then the work we did there.
The building as it stands now is between Hayes Street and Fern Street in Arlington, Virginia. The site is about a half mile south of the Pentagon.
It is now a mall called Pentagon Mall, with stores such as Costco, Marshals, Borders, Linen 'n Things, Best Buy, and a bunch of small shops. While there today, we didn't go into Costco but looked in the door. It appears that the remodel did very little to the warehouse area except to remove equipment, paint and replace the lights. The ceiling and walls still look exactly as they do in my 1972 photos.
The photograph above is the back of the building which shows the old receiving dock where I worked. Most of the bays are now bricked up. The 5 bays to the far right were the loading bays. This entire area, about 1/4 of the building, is now the Costco store.
The photo below shows the South side of the building. This was the original employee parking lot. Today was New Years' Eve day and the parking was totally crazy.
The photograph below is of the North West corner. The part of the building to the right on this photo is what was the front of the old WECO plant.
Now, let me talk about the work I did at the plant. . . .