At a Georgetown Museum, Young Volunteers Answer the Call to Preserve Phone History

The machine that fills the room on the upper floor of the Duwamish Central Office in Georgetown has been working since 1923. Rows of brass rods rise and fall, shafts turn, and a steady chorus of whirring and clicking fills the windowless space whenever a call moves through it.

Sarah Autumn stands beside the machine, which is taller than she is, and watches it the way someone might watch a river.

"Sometimes I just kind of sit here with it," she said. "Just let my mind wander."

Autumn, 41, is chief engineer at the Connections Museum Seattle, the volunteer-built telephone museum tucked inside a working Lumen phone company building on East Marginal Way South. The machine beside her, called a panel switch, once connected the calls of thousands of households by physically moving metal.

"This is not a thing I normally say out loud," Autumn said, "but I'm probably the last living expert on this machine, and on many of these machines here."

The sentiment encapsulates what's happening on this corner of Georgetown. Since the 1980s, the Connections Museum has preserved the hidden machinery of the telephone age. Now it is growing faster than at any point in its history, thanks to a merger, the receipt of roughly 10 tractor-trailer loads of new equipment this year alone, and two new museums under construction — one in a secret location in the Rainier Valley.

But the issue museum volunteers here worry about most can't be loaded onto a truck: These days, there are few people who know how to keep the machines running. And their knowledge is disappearing.

'An Infinite Oasis'

Autumn first walked in as a visitor in 2015 after she read about the museum online. At an art museum, visitors keep a respectful distance. Here, she was invited to get right up to the exhibits.

At the time, the museum was run by an older cohort of retired telephone workers, many of whom have since died. The volunteer intake process was simple.

"You'd say, 'Hey, can I volunteer?' And they would say, 'Sure, show up,'" she said.

Autumn has no formal training in electronics or engineering. She grew up on a farm, surrounded by machines — tractors, cars, ovens, VCRs, cameras — and by people who fixed them. She considers herself autistic, which she said shapes how she works. "I can see a behavior over here and a different behavior over here," she said, "and I'm very good at making mental connections between things."

Her main mentor was Les Anderson, a World War II veteran and lifelong Western Electric employee who installed much of this equipment when it was new. Anderson died around 2022. Her technical teacher was Bob Dickensheets, now about 96. He can no longer see well or drive, so he rarely comes in. After 10 years as a volunteer, Autumn was hired this year as the museum's chief engineer.

The gap between the machines and the people who understand them is wide. The panel switch was installed in the 1920s. The last people still alive who worked on it did so in the 1970s. The handful of experts who remain haven't touched this equipment in 30 or 40 years.

"It's not that they aren't knowledgeable," Autumn said. "It's just that they don't have that practical memory anymore. As would anyone who hasn't done something in 40 years."

Volunteer Colin Slater, who works on the museum's electronic switching systems, faces a problem related not to design, but history. Autumn said his work on the museum's 3ESS switch is "off the flowchart," because the standard fix when those machines were in service was simply to call the manufacturer for a new part. There is no manufacturer to call now.

So Autumn teaches. The museum's youngest volunteers are in their early 20s. She said she understands why younger people are drawn in. Paraphrasing a younger volunteer named Max, she described the hollowness of modern screen work.

"You have this mind-bending amount of processing capability, but you kind of poke the keyboard all day, and at the end of the day, what do you have?" she said. For curious, engineering-minded people, she said, the museum is "an infinite oasis of new things to learn and new projects."

Two Generations, One Torch

The museum was founded in the 1980s by retired Pacific Northwest Bell employees who learned their craft on the job. One founder, Herb Warrick, had been a technician on the panel switch that still runs in the building. So had his father.

"They were the people who were here to pass on the knowledge to the next group of volunteers, who were the Sarahs and the Colins and so on," said Peter Amstein, a volunteer docent and president of the board of the Telecommunications History Group, the Denver-based nonprofit that runs the museum.

Today, Autumn said, the volunteers fall into two distinct groups: those aged 20 to 40 and those 60 and above. Amstein said the younger cohort is what sets Seattle apart.

As a kid in California, Cody Harris stumbled onto archived bulletin board files about phone phreaking, the old underground hobby of exploring and manipulating the telephone network. After moving to Seattle in 2018, Harris found the recordings of Evan Doorbell, a phone enthusiast who taped the telephone network in the 1970s.

A passing mention on a 1990s-style website pointed him to a phone museum in Seattle. He took a tour in 2019, when he was 28 or 29, and learned that the panel switch upstairs was the last working one in existence.

"I just asked, kind of on the spot, 'Can I volunteer here?'" he said.

When the pandemic shut the doors, the volunteers kept meeting on weekly Zoom calls. Harris said he has since helped haul a DMS-10 switch up from Huntsville, Alabama. It was lifted into the building by crane through a second-story equipment door that, Amstein noted, looks like it would drop someone to their death if they stepped out of it.

The newest volunteer, Matthew DeBlois, 21, found the museum through its YouTube channel. A recent college graduate with a political science degree, he is spending a gap year learning to give tours. He said the social history draws him most: the operators, the engineers, and the ordinary visitors who stop mid-tour to say their grandparents' phone number ran through this very office.

'Into the Future'

As private collectors around the country get older, some are asking what will happen to their life's work. Increasingly, the answer is this: Send it to Seattle.

One such collection belonged to John K. La Rue, whose JKL Museum of Telephony, near Santa Cruz, California, held some of the finest examples of telephones anywhere. La Rue's nonprofit and the Telecommunications History Group merged, and his collection came north.

The merger also brought Remco Enthoven, JKL's curator, who joined the Seattle museum's small paid staff this year. "He's the brains behind that collection," Autumn said.

That collection is now being reassembled in a building on Rainier Avenue South, which is being called Waverly Seven. The building has no sign, and the museum won't share its address until it's ready for the public. Autumn said the space on Rainier recalls a standard gallery. "It's much more museum-y," she said.

When the volunteers go home from the Georgetown museum and the lights are turned off, the room can feel strange. "It's just a little bit eerie," Autumn said.

The museum can generate its own phone traffic. So, often when she's there alone, Autumn turns the machines on and sends calls through them — and the old room fills with the sound of relays clicking and shafts turning, for no one but her.

"Machines are no good if they sit there on a shelf and don't do anything," she said. "It's meant and designed to work, and this one's been working for 100 years."

"All I'm doing," she added, "is carrying it a little bit further into the future."

The Connections Museum Seattle, located in the Georgetown neighborhood at East Marginal Way South and Corson Avenue South, is open most Sundays for docent-led tours. More information is available at telcomhistory.org.