Tel-news Collection

A New Jersey Bell public relations tool that débuted in May 1935, Tel-news was a folded single-sheet leaflet produced in the company headquarters at 540 Broad Street, Newark, and mailed to customers as an insert with their monthly telephone bills. With more than 3 million subscribers at its height, Tel-news was probably the most widely circulated periodical in the state.

The creator of Tel-news was Frank P. Townsend (1901-1970), who served for 32 years as its writer and editor. A former newspaperman who joined New Jersey Bell in 1928, Townsend recalled that Tel-news came about because customers did not look forward to seeing the monthly bill arrive in the mail: “I was given one year to think up an idea where persons would be waiting on their front porch for the mailman to bring the telephone bill.” Townsend conceived of an insert that would blend telephone company news, information and advice with facts and anecdotes from New Jersey’s rich past. The content of these historical and cultural notes and articles ranged across three centuries and all of the state’s twenty-one counties. Townsend and successive Tel-news writers and editors received regular reference assistance from Miriam V. Studley and Charles F. Cummings of Newark Public Library’s New Jersey Division.

Many New Jersey stories in the 1946-1949 issues of Tel-news were illustrated with scenes of historic sites drawn by artist Earl Horter (1880-1940). Beginning in 1962, New Jersey Bell commissioned original work from scores of artists and illustrators, most of them New Jersey residents. Harry Devlin (1918-2001) contributed to many issues, and also created fresh illustrations for the two compilations Tales of New Jersey and New Jersey Gold. Artists whose work appeared in Tel-news with some frequency include Bob Brown, Sal Catalano, David F. Henderson, Dick Kramer, Charles Mazoujian and Kaaren Lewis (Kaaren Shandroff).

The insert’s popularity over the years led to two publications in book form of “the best and most interesting” stories, first as Tales of New Jersey (1963) and then as New Jersey Gold (1985).


Bell Telephone, New Jersey Bell and Bell Atlantic:

Inventor Alexander Graham Bell formed the Bell Telephone Company in 1877. Its absorption by American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) in 1885 gave the Bell System and its parent company a virtual monopoly over local and long distance telephone service that endured for a century.

Until 1927, most local telephone service in northern New Jersey was provided by New York and New Jersey Telephone Company, an AT&T subsidiary. In that year New Jersey Bell, the AT&T provider in southern New Jersey, took over services in the north of the state as well. Known as “Ma Bell,” AT&T became the largest private employer in New Jersey. At the height of its 100-year history, tens of thousands worked for New Jersey Bell as switchboard operators, linemen, installers, repair workers, engineers, research scientists, electrical workers, directory compilers, drivers and designers.

Western Electric Company, originally the research and development branch of AT&T until Bell Telephone Laboratories (Bell Labs) took over those functions in 1925, manufactured almost all equipment and components for Bell Telephone until 1984. One of New Jersey’s largest employers, Western Electric had seven locations in the state, including the mammoth Kearny Works in South Kearny.

Many telecommunication milestones occurred in New Jersey, including the first long-distance call conveyed by underground cable, made between Newark and New York City in 1902; the birth of radio astronomy at the Bell Labs facility in Holmdel in the 1930s; invention of the transistor and the pioneering of information theory at Bell Labs in Murray Hill in the late 1940s; long-distance direct dialing, introduced to Bell’s Englewood customers in 1951; and Telstar I, a communications satellite developed by Bell Labs, built at Western Electric’s Hillside plant and launched in 1962.

After the breakup of the Bell System in 1984, a regional operating company called Bell Atlantic provided telecommunications services in New Jersey and five (later six) other states. Bell Atlantic was renamed Verizon in 2000.