Small town finally gets phone service

This is just amazing. Who would think that with all the technical advances over the last 50 years that we would still have some places without phones?

MINK, La. - There's a fish-fry Monday in this hamlet of 15 households to celebrate big news: phone service. Gov. Kathleen Blanco plans to call 83-year-old Mink resident Alma Louise Bolton from Baton Rouge to mark the occasion, which finally connects one of the nation's last rural areas without access to regular phone service.

"We started in early 1970 trying to get a phone," Bolton said. "We'd talk to the phone company but they'd never call back. Some in the community bought CBs (citizen band radios). We tried those for a while."

BellSouth Corp. has spent $700,000 — or about $47,000 per phone — to extend about 30 miles of cable through thick forests to Mink, about 100 miles south of Shreveport. All phone customers in the state will cover the cost through a small monthly charge on their bills.

Lawrence St. Blanc, secretary for the Public Service Commission, which regulates utility and telecommunications companies in the state, said the monthly charge should be less than a dollar a month.

The commission has set up a fund where the money will be deposited to ensure that the poor and people in rural areas continue to have access to telephones. It will both subsidize their rates and repay phone companies when the cost of connecting isolated rural pockets to residential phone service exceeds $1,500 per phone.

Tucked away in the Kisatchie National Forest near the Texas state line, Mink is the last settlement of full-time residents in Louisiana without phone service, St. Blanc said.

"At least that we know about," he said.

Another small community called Shaw, about 80 miles to the east, recently got a cell phone tower for its few year-round residents and many hunting camps.

"It's wonderful," said Judy Ballard, 58, who lives in Shaw. "But it took me losing my husband" to get the service.

For years, she and others in the area had lobbied the PSC for some kind of phone service. Then Ballard's husband, Mike, had a heart attack in May 1998.

A neighbor raced to the top of a levee to try to get a cellular phone signal from anywhere. The 911 operator he reached was in Mississippi, and it took 90 minutes for an emergency crew to arrive.