TELEPHONE PIONEERS WIN STATE AWARD

by Eileen Keim

From left: James Dimick, President; Jasper Keller, Chapter (ME, NH,VT) Telephone Pioneers of America; New Hamphsire Governor, the Honorable Jeanne Shaheen; Mary Lefebvre, President, N.H. Council TPA; and Leonard Nystedt, Chair of the Concord Talking Book Equipment Repair group, TPA.

December 1, 1997 was a dark and stormy night, treacherous underfoot and under wheel. It was the occasion of New Hampshire Governor Jeanne Shaheen's first Volunteer Recognition Awards, and the New Hampshire chapter of the Bell-Atlantic Telephone Pioneers of America were to be announced as the Adult Volunteer Group of the Year.

The Pioneers had been nominated by the State Library's Talking Book Service largely for their years of work maintaining the Federally supplied "talking book machines" from the days of the tube-powered record players through the transistor - and battery-powered cassette players of today. During the award year, this service alone was worth more than $51,000 in saved Government expense.

But that was far from the only service provided by the Pioneers. they provided more than 11,000 hours of hard work for the construction of Northwood Meadows State park, 6,600 hours to the New Hampshire Special Olympics; ran the "Mini-Indy" race to raise some $60,000 for Junior Achievement; funded and ran the Infant Hearing Assessment Project with Dartmouth-Hitchcock Hospital, providing free auditory testing to high-risk babies; produced 306 teddy bears in 306 hours, so that police and emergency personnel would have a comforting gift for children in traumatic situations; and provided a variety of programs for mentally and physically challenged children and adults around the state. One Pioneer, Brad Lawrence, even volunteered to help repair cracks in the New Hampshire icon, the Old Man of the Mountains.

The history of Pioneer repair for New Hampshire talking book equipment predates the opening of the New Hampshire regional library for library services to the disabled by many years. While New Hampshire residents received their books from the Massachusetts Library at Perkins School for the Blind, playing equipment was managed by the New Hampshire Bureau of Blind Services. it was only in the mid-1970s that the library was able to take on machine lending, and only in the 1990s that the library and its landlord, the State Hospital, were able to make work and storage space available to the Pioneers.

The weather on award night prevented many Pioneers from attending and savoring their well-deserved recognition. Of the Pioneer Equipment Repair Group, only the Chairman, Leonard E. Nystedt, was present. The other members of the highly skilled New Hampshire Pioneer repair group sharing in this richly deserved recognition are William Beers, Arthur Briggs, Orrin Chase, Bernard Colgan, Gerald Faneuf, Richard Jones, Donald Lower, Richard Sibley, Robert Stevens and John Ton.