Water service slow to arrive
By Sarah Henning
The Forum - 08/22/1999

1981: It was the year newspaper headlines announced the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan. Millions of "Days of Our Lives" fans watched Luke and Laura get married. And people living in rural Cass County got running water.

That's right. Cass Rural Water Users didn't finish laying pipe in the county until 1981, 70 years after Fargo built its first water treatment plant.

It took advances in plastic pipe, government loan programs and a flood of fed-up residents like Fay J. Waxler to bring the rural people of Cass into the 20th century, after the century had almost left them in the dust.

Welling frustration

Seventy-seven-year-old Waxler, the first president of Cass Rural Water Users, still farms on the same site his father did north of Mapleton, N.D., in Cass County.

He remembers when the family's soft water supply came from placing rain barrels under the eaves. Then his mother would boil the collected water in a large porcelain crock for drinking.

The Waxler family had a well, but the water was brown and filled with bad-tasting, possibly harmful chemicals. Well water was used primarily for household and livestock use.

"My mother ran that water through a flour sack to strain it for washing clothes and dishes, but the water was so hard and dirty, we still had to wash all the whites at the Laundromat in Fargo," Waxler said.

And it wasn't just people who suffered from low-grade water. Waxler said his family's attempts to raise sheep stopped when their lambs kept inexplicably dying. Researchers at North Dakota State University studied one dead lamb and determined the cause - infected water.

All dried up

Waxler's stories are typical of those told all around the country during the 1920s and '30s, when water in rural areas wasn't regulated or tested, and when, during drought, farmers were often lucky to have any water at all.

But the unhealthy and inconvenient water situation persisted into the 1970s in Cass County.

When Waxler began running his own farming operation, he paid for two dry holes and still had no water.

"In certain areas there was plentiful water, then five miles away, there was nothing," Waxler said.

Waxler and his neighbors were getting desperate.

"I was hauling water from Fargo with a 1,000-gallon tank. And we were all thinking, 'You know, it's fine living out here in the country and all, but the folks in Fargo have good water and we don't.'

"Then, luckily, I heard about this rural water stuff going on in Grand Forks."

Taking the plunge

One day in 1973, Waxler and 10 of his neighbors met with Willard Grager of Cass Co. Electric Cooperative, to see if starting a rural water system in the county was possible.

In the 1960s, Farmer's Home Administration had begun giving out loans to people starting rural water systems. According to Waxler, warmer states like Oklahoma and Texas got rural water in quickly with the help of these loans.

"But here, to keep PVC pipe from freezing, we had to dig 7 feet deep. That meant special equipment, more time and especially, more money," Waxler said.

But Grand Forks and Traill counties had already started working out those kinks in 1969, when they formed the first rural water corporation in North Dakota.

Waxler was determined to do it in Cass County, too.

"It took convincing. People in those days hadn't seen this pipe, thought it wasn't possible that all the water they needed could come from miles away through one-half-inch pipe."

A flood of interest

Cass Rural Water Users was formed in November 1973, and Waxler was elected president.

The nonprofit corporation held its first informational meetings in Kindred and Mapleton that same year - and the people came in droves. It cost each family $200 to sign an agreement with Cass water.

Just when the project was taking shape, the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974 was passed, which set standards for water served to the public.

"This got the cities' attention because they didn't have filtration systems and Cass' water filtration system was being designed to take out iron and manganese, and add fluoride," Waxler said.

So the corporation offered bulk rates to all the cities in the county, and all but two jumped on the bandwagon.

Cass Rural Water Users' system grew so fast, it quickly moved beyond the original plans to hook up only the areas immediately surrounding Fargo.

Soon, the project was divided into three phases, and Houston Engineering in Fargo had its hands full designing a system large enough to accommodate the county, Waxler said.

According to Forum archives, construction was started in 1975 by Frederickson's of North Dakota, Inc., Fargo.

It wasn't easy work and there were glitches. Workers dug until Dec. 1 to get water to the city of Casselton, since its main source of water had frozen. "Those workers made every effort. It was down to 10 degrees when Casselton got its hookups," Waxler said.

Phase three construction finished in the northern part of the county near Page in 1981.

Today, 22,556 people are served by Cass Rural Water Users, said company official Pat McCollum. Nearly 5 million gallons of water are piped through Cass' system every year.

"When people had such bad quality water, they didn't bother putting in dishwashers or even automatic washers," Waxler said.

"But now, after rural water, country people have the same conveniences as city people. And that's the way it should be."

Telephones make major advances over the years
By Sarah Henning
The Forum - 08/22/1999

When children try to use the rotary phones at Bonanzaville's phone museum, they often put their fingers on the numbers and push - and are surprised when nothing happens.

"It just goes to show how far telephones have come," says Arnie Pauls, who has been a curator at the museum for 27 years and a manager at Northwestern Bell Telephone from 1945 to 1982.

In 1900, "Ring Down" phones were just coming into vogue. The phones had to be cranked to ring the operator, who would then make a connection for the caller. The phones cost around $50. "Which was a lot of money in those days," says John Bartholomay, who worked as an engineer for Northwestern Bell from 1948 to 1984, and helps Pauls manage the museum.

Phone calls at that time cost about 5 cents a minute. Most phone "companies" were usually ma and pa operations, says Pauls. The wife would do day shift on the switchboard, and the daughters would sleep in a cot next to the board to manage night calls.

Bartholomay estimates about one in 50 people had phones in 1900, and that was usually only in town - limited technology and cost prevented rural telephone service from becoming widespread until the Rural Electrification Administration sponsored loans for rural telephone co-ops in the 1940s.

"Farmers found out about then that they needed phones to communicate instead of risking their lives trying to get into town through deep snow," Pauls says.

Bartholomay says often farmers would volunteer to help put in poles and dig holes to pay off some of the cost of installation.

Often 20 farms were hooked onto the same line. The operator would use a different type of ring so each family would know who the call was for. But Pauls says that didn't keep the other 19 families from getting on the phone line and listening in.

Since then, advances in technology have eliminated that problem and many others.

Pauls says the most significant advancement made in telephones this century is the transistor, which improved tone quality and allowed voices to be carried longer distances without amplification.

Invented in 1947 by Bell Lab, the first transistor was made of paper clip-like metal twists. Today 7.5 million transistors fit in a square computer chip the same size as that first transistor.

Another major development for phone companies has been fiberglass wiring. Each fiberglass strand is smaller than a hair, and will hold over a million conversations - 240,000 times more than was held by regular copper cable used in the past.

Other, more recent developments include cordless and cellular phones and Pauls' personal favorite, the videophone.

"I think the videophone is great. My daughter lives in Texas and we each have one. I gotta see the granddaughter in her pretty dresses, you know."