Tiny Phone Firm Rings True to Past : Family-Run Operation Calls Clients Neighbors, Stresses Personal Service

GRAY, Me. —  Tim Hutchison grew up sharing his home with the local phone company. The operator sat in the family’s living room with her switchboard, and in those days of good old-fashioned personal service, there wasn’t much about the town that she didn’t know.

“You’d pick up the phone then and ask for number 48,” Hutchison recalled the other day, “and she’d say, ‘Oh, you want Gene Webb. He’s over to Dickie’s house. Let me ring him there.’ The operator was everyone’s personal answering service.”

Those days, of course, are gone, even in rural Maine, but the privately owned Pine Tree Telephone & Telegraph Co. that Hutchison’s father ran out of the family home still flourishes as one of those lovely throwbacks to the past--a lean, efficient little company with a simple motto: “The customer is a neighbor and he should be treated like one.”

“My people know that if they do a little something special for the customer that’s going to cost me an extra 10 bucks, they’re not going to get chewed out; they’re going to get praised,” said Hutchison, who took over the company from his father in 1974, 14 years after graduating from high school. Hutchison and his family own Pine Tree by themselves.

Pine Tree serves 4,509 subscribers in the southern Maine towns of Gray and New Gloucester and is one of 1,367 independent phone companies in the country. The largest, according to the U.S. Telephone Assn. in Washington, is GTE, with 11.5 million access lines; the smallest, excluding some mom-and-pop operations in Alaska, is the Absaraka Cooperative Telephone Co. in North Dakota with 26.

Hutchison has moved Pine Tree out of the family home and into a handsome, remodeled farmhouse, built in the mid-1700s, at the edge of town. He insists that his 16 non-union telephone employees all live in the subscriber area on the premise that in a small community service is a personal matter and an unhappy customer ought to be able to complain directly to the person who billed him or rigged up his phone incorrectly.

Pine Tree’s profit margin is above average--according to the Maine Public Utilities Commission, it made $660,120 on revenue of $2.4 million last year--and the company’s rates and costs are below average, partly because Hutchison knows the value of New England frugality. He only recently bought his first photocopying machine--someone used to walk across the street to the high school and get copies made for 10 cents--and there’s not a computer in sight, not even for bookkeeping. Customer, property and inventory records are all entered in various ledgers by hand. With no competition, there is no need to advertise.

For the past three years, Hutchison hasn’t charged local businesses that repeat their same advertisements in Pine Tree’s 96-page phone book. It’s not worth the time and money, he figures, to tie up his employees with sales. When an out-of-town florist called to take out an ad, he was refused politely: “Sorry. We already have a local florist advertising.”

But if Pine Tree remains quaint in the home office, its switching terminal out back--linked for toll calls with New England Telephone and AT&T--represents; the state of the art in technology. Subscriber complaints get immediate attention, even if a repairman has to scramble up a pole at 2 a.m. on New Year’s Day in the bone-numbing chill of the Maine winter.

Pine Tree has benefited from the development boom in southern Maine, but Hutchison has little interest in expanding. “I’m not really an entrepreneur,” he said, “and I have no desire to work 18-, 20-hour days. I’m just as happy trying to run what I have and run it right.”