May 2005

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TelCo Retirees Association, Inc.

May 11, 2005

Oakland Quarterly Membership Meeting

June 8, 2005
To All Members:

Our second 2005 Quarterly Membership Meeting will be held at the Hilton Oakland Airport Hotel, 1 Hagenberger Rd., Oakland CA. (Telephone number: 510-635-5000)

For members planning for accommodations at the hotel, you may call the above 800 number.

The Quarterly Meeting will convene in the International Ball Room (Rooms 4, 5, 6 - Building 4) at 9:30 A.M. and conclude at 12 o'clock noon. We plan to have coffee and refreshments available. The International Ball Room will be open at 9:00 A.M. for members who may wish to arrive early.

To assure we have adequate seating for our members, we are asking those of you with email access (and who plan to attend) to confirm your attendance at skemery@telcoretirees.org

Quarterly Meetings are open to all Association members including those in surrounding communities (San Francisco, San Jose, Los Altos, Foster City, etc.). We encourage members attending to invite Pacific Bell retired friends and former associates. (Be sure to include them when you confirm your attendance plans.)

Our agenda will include a budget review, membership plans and programs, Bylaws highlights, Quarterly Newsletters/Surveys, Publicity, Membership Cards.

The President will review all current issues, including telephone concession service, Pacific Telesis Group Pension concerns, current SBC/UHC health care issues, EEOC/Medicare and the National Retrirees Legislative Network.

The primary purpose of Quarterly Meetings is to receive input from all members in attendance. We plan to leave adequate time at the end of our presentations for your comments, concerns and recommendations.

Sumner K. Emery, President

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Subject: The sad demise of a friend - AT&T

Death Of A Friend - From an Orlando Newspaper.

The oldest, most trusted friend of my professional life is dying. I feel lost already. She is my longest-running colleague, the only companion who has traveled with me every mile of my career.

She got me out of more jams than I can count and helped me beat unforgiving deadlines from Tallahassee to Tokyo; Memphis to Monte Carlo; South Bend to South Korea; Suwanee, Ga., to Stockholm, Sweden; Melbourne, Fla., to Melbourne, Australia; Oxford, Miss., to Oxford, England.

The only variables were whether I could get to a place, then report a story fast enough. She always handled the rest. If I couldn't get there fast enough, she always made sure I was in immediate touch with the key players in a story.

She always kept me in close contact with home and family, wherever I was. When my infant son first was able to sit up on his own, she let me know within minutes -- and I was on the other side of the planet.

The flip side was, whenever an editor wanted to growl at me or give me an order, from 10 miles or 10,000 miles away, she let it happen almost instantaneously.

She was, for all of the 20th century, the very spinal cord of sports journalism, and indeed all journalism, in this country and around the world.

Even before I got a job, or even went to college, I was her dependent.

She announced my birth to the world -- well, actually to the handful of relatives and family friends who were interested. And for most of my life, I fully expected her to announce my death to whoever might care.

She gave me my first real-time contact with sports, bringing me baseball from faraway Yankee Stadium, and the Ole Miss Rebels from Baton Rouge, La., 150 miles distant.

Radio and TV stations in those days received remote programming via telephone lines. Thus the origin of the word, "network."

In her prime, we grumbled about her, like all normal children do about all good mothers. When we were young, we called her Ma Bell. The term seems sexist now, but I draw license from historical fact to use it here, along with the feminine pronouns.

To be sure, there already are myriad surrogates for her. But none can replace her, down deep in my whole sense of security.

She is dying at the age of 130. She was birthed in 1875 by Alexander Graham Bell. Her full name is long forgotten by the masses: the American Telephone & Telegraph Company. Only barely does youth recognize her initials, AT&T.

Time was when she was the only phone company, local or long distance. Even her hardware was made in-house; all quality telephone sets were made by Western Electric, a subsidiary of what legions of absolutely loyal employees called "The Bell System," in the reverent tones of patriots speaking of early America.

She was the absolute monarch of communications, but benign.

She was badly injured 21 years ago -- federal lawsuits tore her asunder, into the "Baby Bells" -- Bell South, Pacific Bell, etc. -- but allowed to keep her long-distance empire.

"Sometimes," a wise man named Richard Petty once told me, "monopolies are a good thing -- the best thing, for certain situations."

He was talking about tire wars in NASCAR among manufacturers, and how rushed production often ended in injury or death to drivers. For the sake of uniformity and safety, one company, he said, must be the exclusive provider.

He said that circa 1988, and even then I thought immediately of Ma Bell, for the ramifications of her dismemberment already were beginning to set in on society.

A fledgling company called MCI sued AT&T, demanding the right to rent long-distance lines, and along came another attacker named Sprint, and before long, Ma Bell's illness was terminal, though we didn't know it then.

Still, businesses and individuals who absolutely, positively, had to have completely reliable telecommunications stayed unflinchingly with AT&T. This category certainly included newspapers and magazines.

Only once in the 20th century did a publication where I worked switch to another long-distance carrier, supposedly to save money. It was such a disaster that every traveling reporter on the staff revolted. The return
to AT&T came too late. The publication folded.

Since then, I can't tell you how many hundred telemarketers from Whizbang Supersaver Local Family & Global Networking, with rates of one cent per year, I've cut off in mid-sentence:

"Hold it! Stop! Before you say another word, let me tell you that the telephone is as vital to my being as brainwaves, and therefore I am an AT&T customer till the day I die. Period."

It won't turn out that way now.

The wolfpacks of hyper-ambitious companies kept coming. But from the boondocks of Darlington, S.C., to midtown Manhattan, you could bypass any hotel's cheapo long-distance carrier with the magic touch of 1-800-CALLATT.

At the advent of the cellular phone, I messed around with several ding-a-ling carriers until AT&T Wireless emerged. I jumped on it before I realized that poor Ma Bell, in her pressing poverty, had sold her very name to someone else. Still it worked, continent-wide better than anything else. Now that company has been bought by some swirling
conglomerate of carriers I found inept in the past. I fear the worst.

Of course, you know what happened to the original invader, MCI. It became part of WorldCom, which ended up in the most scandalous corporate collapse in history, gutting the retirement security of multitudes. It returned to the name MCI and now is at the brink of being absorbed by
Sprint. So goes the sea of electronic sharks.

The land lines I use remain AT&T, but a few months ago came word that she no longer would seek new long distance customers, so you knew the end was near.

Then last week, some company called SBC -- based, wouldn't you know it, in that corporate free-for-all called Texas -- announced plans to take over AT&T entirely.

Apparently they'll continue to use the AT&T brand. But that's about like expecting Napoleon III to be as strong as Napoleon Bonaparte.

I've done fairly well with this whole notion of future shock. I've gone in my time from upright manual typewriters to notebook computers; from dignified air travel to today's subways of the skies; from candid, one-on-one interviews to staged, mass news conferences with fabricated,
manipulated, artificial images of sports people.

I have withstood all that, but this . this . . .

I am lost already -- heartsick in a way no other future shock has rendered me. This is a death in every American family. 

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