Sonoma Stories: The steady hand working the phones at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital

If you phoned Memorial Hospital 40, 50 or even nearly 60 years ago, it was quite likely Marilyn Goodwin who answered and connected you with whomever you needed to be connected.

Dial the main number at Memorial today and there’s still a chance Goodwin will pick up.

She was 29 years old and a veteran Pacific Bell operator when she sat for the first time at the telephone switchboard. A few weeks back she turned 88.

Goodwin remembers that before she was given the job in 1958, the Catholic hospital’s Sister Mary Ligouri shook a finger in her face.

“You make me a promise,” demanded Ligouri of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange, which had opened the hospital just eight years earlier, “that you won’t go back to the phone company, like the others did.”

Goodwin promised. And today she’s Memorial’s longest-serving employee ever.

Since she was hired 59 years ago, virtually everything at the Santa Rosa hospital has changed, but not the verve and loyalty of this one telephone switchboard operator. Precise and nimble and still naturally dark-haired, Goodwin remembers when there were maybe 12 lines on the telephone cordboard.

Back then, there were no phones in the patient rooms. It was a big deal, Goodwin recalls, when patients were able to rent a phone - for 25 cents a day.

A thought came to the lifelong telephone operator. She said, “We didn’t have televisions (in the rooms) either, but pretty soon you could rent one of them, too.”

Back when, Goodwin knew, very well, all of the doctors and nurses and other hospital employees.

“We were a family then, when we were little,” she said. These days, “every time I come in, there’s a new name I haven’t run into.”

Over the decades, Goodwin was retrained on six new telephone systems. Having to adjust to a modern keyboard nearly did her in.

“I’m not a computer person,” she said. Almost 60 years after she plugged and pulled switchboard cords, she hunts and pecks on a keyboard with one hand.

The nuns who for decades ran Memorial Hospital now are gone. Goodwin rather misses them.

“They were very strict and everybody knew what was expected of them,” she said over coffee in the cafeteria, with its view of Santa Rosa Creek. “You knew exactly where you stood with them.”

When Sister Ligouri hired her in 1958, she hired someone who was already a veteran telephone operator.

Goodwin left Santa Rosa High School as a junior to go to work for Pacific Bell as a long-distance operator.

She was 18 and at the town roller rink when, in 1947, she met a young sailor assigned to the former Naval Air Station off of Stony Point Road. They married and she moved with him to New Jersey, which for the native Californian took some getting used to.

“I’d never seen snow in my life,” Goodwin said. “The first time I saw it, I said, ‘Where is all that ash coming from?’ ”

She took a job with New Jersey Bell and tried to make a go of it. But in 1956 she concluded that her marriage and her sojourn on the East Coast had run their course.

“I learned to drive a car,” she said, “and I drove cross country.” Arriving back in Santa Rosa, she moved in with her parents.

In 1958, her older sister, Jackie, who’d also been a telephone operator, applied for and was offered the job on Memorial Hospital’s switchboard. But she decided she didn’t want it.

So Goodwin applied. Before long she was treasured by co-workers throughout the hospital, not only for her friendly and efficient manner but for her creativity.

A prolific artist, Goodwin volunteered to decorate and illustrate bulletin-board announcements, newsletters and cards. A Christmas scene she painted was displayed prominently at the hospital for years.

Goodwin hasn’t been on the job at the switchboard for all of the past 59 years. She remarried and in the 1960s took about three years off to be home with her son.

She broke hearts throughout the hospital in 1994 by announcing that she would retire. Then just 65, she quickly decided she couldn’t bear to quit entirely and agreed to come in and work the phones on the weekends and whenever she’s needed for weekday fill-in.

At 88, Goodwin typically is on the job for five hours on Sundays. She said she has no intention to ever entirely leave the job that she loves and believes to be important.

Answering the phone at Memorial “is my whole life,” she said. “It gives me the incentive to get up and get out.”

Though so much has changed since 1958, she said, “It’s still my hospital.”

Chris Smith is at 707-521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.