FRANCES SCHEILER

Frances Koeniger Scheiler was born in Georgia in 1913.  Her father, a German-born man, had left home when he was young and immigrated to America, never looking back.  It wasn't until Frances was a young adult that she was able to contact her family in Germany, only to find some of her relatives had been lost in combat in World War II.

Frances went to work for American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) in El Dorado, Arkansas in 1930 when she was not quite 18 years old.  She started as an operator working with a "bunch of plugs" which she learned to manipulate very quickly. 

"I was very fast and it was easy for me because I had a good memory," Scheiler said, a look of pride on her face.

The kind of equipment she operated had a big board which rose in front of her, and a lots of pairs of cords.  One cord was to plug into the line the caller rang in on.  She would say "Number, please," then plug the other cord in that pair into the line the person asked for.  All the lines in town were marked on the board, but Frances had their places memorized so she could quickly plug the caller into the right line. 

When AT&T began to switch over to dial phones, Frances put in for a transfer to Detroit, then moved to Chicago, then to Little Rock, then back to Chicago once again where she met her husband.  Jim Scheiler had been headed toward New Mexico and had stopped in Lake Charles, Louisiana to visit a friend who, coincidentally, was married to a friend of Frances.  Scheiler saw a picture of Frances on their piano and asked who she was.  Told she lived in Chicago, where he was from, he was determined to contact her when he returned home. 

He called her ten times, asking for a date, but she was seeing someone else at the time.  When that man stood her up one evening, she decided the next time Jim called she would go out with him.  It turned out later he had told a friend, "I am going to call her once more and if she tells me no, that's it." 

She said, "Yes," they went out, and were married six months later. 

Life might have been a simple "and they lived happily ever after," had it not been for World War II.

They married in 1938 and shortly thereafter headed for New Mexico in a new 1938 Chrysler, not knowing Jim would soon be drafted.  While traveling in the southwest they saw a ranch they believed could easily become a Dude Ranch, a popular enterprise in the 1930s due to the western films being produced in that decade.  It was near Route 66 and a range of mountains.   Jim and Frances were anxious to get away from Chicago and start a life away from Jim's family's deli and grocery business, so they put everything they had into the property.

It was while he had worked for his family's business that his name was changed from Reinhold Scheiler to Jim Scheiler by a salesman who couldn't remember his real name.  He started calling him Jim and it stuck.  By the time Frances met him everyone called him Jim and it wasn't until after they were married that she found out she was married to Reinhold, not Jim.

They had barely moved onto their ranch when Jim was drafted into the Army and they ended up losing their property because of his having to report for induction.  When he was drafted Jim took Frances, who was on furlough from the telephone company, back to Chicago and reported to an army base in West Texas.  Not long after that Frances made what she calls the shortest telephone call she ever made in her life.  With great difficulty she had managed to connect with Jim in Texas only to burst into tears when she heard his voice.

"I'm going to have a baby," she sobbed, then hung up the phone.

She then went back to work at AT&T and, as with so many young service wives at the time, she found housing with other people so she could afford to live on what she could make and what Jim could send home to her.  In those days a pregnant working girl could only stay on the job about five months.  So Frances ended up staying with family and friends.  Jim was only able to visit her once.

Meanwhile, Jim, who had been drafted under the quota of the town near their ranch in New Mexico, discovered if he had been living in Chicago, he likely would not have been drafted since there were so many single men there eligible for the draft.  And, the Navy shipyard he had worked for as a leadman in Orange, Texas wanted him to return to work there for the Navy.  Since the Navy had first call on Jim, and would not release him to the Army, he was able to get out of the Army and return to Lake Charles, near the Texas border.  He arrived there the day before their first of three daughters was born.

Frances again took furlough from her telephone company job and they moved in with some friends who also had a small baby, making the living quarters extremely cramped.  After a short time, that shipyard sent her husband to Everett, Washington, again on a Navy contract.  So, Jim put Frances on a train to Chicago once again.  She stayed there until Jim was able to put together $100 to put down on a house.  Due to the price freeze on homes, they were able to buy it for a pre-war price of $3,000, later selling it for $7,000.  A few months later Frances moved west, with her little girl and another baby on the way. 

Things finally settled down for Jim and Frances Scheiler.  Her reputation on the telephone switchboard gained her opportunity to do vacation replacement work at the shipyard where Jim maintained steady work for about six years.  Since it was a government installation she worked the telephone system, PBX, and wireless all in one little room, just one operator.  Security included a windowless room that had just one little opening in the door.  She had a safety bell she was to ring in the event anything untoward should occur.

She had occasion to ring the bell one day when a man sat down in a chair right outside that door.  He lit up a cigar and the smoke was drawn through the hole in the door into her unventilated, secure work room.  It made her so sick she finally had to ring the safety bell to get someone to come help her get rid of the man and his cigar.  She hates cigar smoke to this day.

When the shipyard folded after the end of the war, Jim Scheiler went to work at Hanford where the Atom Bomb had been built, then got a job in Colfax and moved Frances and their three daughters to a little house eight miles out of town, a house that featured one bedroom, a screened porch, and no plumbing.  Frances smiled as she described the galvanized tub set on their kitchen counter and the step stool leading up to it, an arrangement they used for baths for two years.

Jim and Frances and their family then moved to Pullman where they remodeled a one-hundred-year old house, then built a new house next door, meanwhile starting a heating and sheet metal business.  Frances still lives in her house in Pullman, where she enjoys gardening.  She no longer is moved by the wiles of war.