Direct Action

For 26 hours last week, summer heat and the instinct for direct action, which is inherent in the female mind, raised the very old Ned with telephone service in Gulfport (pop. 22,659), Miss. When the temperature in the telephone company's big switchboard room got to 92DEG, the 69 young ladies on duty all got up and indignantly walked out. B. D. Northcutt, president of the local telephone union, who is negotiating with the company for air conditioning, hurried over and asked them to go back to work. They told him, in effect, to go jump in the river, and to tell the company to do so, too. So did 46 off-duty operators. The girls wanted action.

At first it was hard to tell just what kind of action would do, and since Gulfport has no automatic telephones and service had sagged to almost nothing, something had to be done. The girls solved the problem. The thing to do, they decided, was to make the company let them wear shorts at work. The company agreed and promised, furthermore, to lug 1,600 Ibs. of ice into the room daily to cool the place. The girls went contentedly back to work. Next day, after all was said and done, only six of them wore shorts.

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