Frank Rock, an MCS grad provides the following recollections.
A short story about a short lived "other" telephone "company" and I share this, with no accuracy whatsoever, totally tongue in cheek, by flawed memory, and title it ; "The Strait, Harris Phone co. of New Lisbon New York"
After the sale of the Dimock Hollow Telephone Company sometime ,(I believe) in Feb. 1967, the Chenango and Unadilla Telephone Company went through the area and started upgrading lines and telephones.
The linemen took down miles of phone wire, coiled it up and left it in piles here there and everywhere on the sides of the roads. The old "crank style " phones that I, and many of us, dinosaurs, remember as kids were collected and to my recollection many ended up over the bank at the "old Morris dump," which was on Otsego County 49 frequently called "the old dump road."
There were wall mounted box phones, phones with the crank handle in the middle where the "new fangled" dial apparatus was. There were crank boxes that mounted on the wall and contained dry cells for powering up each, individual "hand set"/ telephone. Well,some of you probably remember Mike Strait from school. He was best friends with Winston Harris, Jr. (Wint) and used to spend quite a bit of time at the Harris farm. You also may remember where he lived up on the hill across from the Konrad Isle farm.