One of my favorite songs is “Wichita Lineman,” which was written by Jimmy Webb in 1968 and first recorded by Glen Campbell. Rolling Stone magazine named it to its list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. The song was also selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry for being culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant. Those are some great honors for a simple song about a simple guy on a simple telephone pole.
Webb said his inspiration for the song came while driving in rural Oklahoma past what seemed like an endless line of telephone poles. In the distance, he saw the silhouette of a lineman atop one of them. He described it as “the picture of loneliness.” Webb envisioned himself as the lineman atop a pole and wrote the lyrics based on what he might be saying into the receiver.
I often think of this song when driving in rural Iowa and seeing those lines of telephone poles. I marvel at the work that must have been involved in installing these and the line to bring what we now refer to as “landline” and DSL service to the masses. And then I wonder how relevant these poles will be with future technologies and what work will be involved in taking them all down. According to the Pew Research Center, approximately 97% of Americans now have a cell phone, and approximately 85% own a smartphone. As of early 2021, 5G technology covered approximately 75% of the U.S. population.
Time will tell the future of the telephone poles, but I am fascinated with the history. The first documented use of wood poles was in 1844 when the telegraph was developed. A $30,000 grant was given to Samuel Morse from the U.S. Congress to install a 40-mile telegraph line between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Morse’s crew tried to install the telegraph lines underground, but the effort failed. His solution was to place the lines overhead, so he sought out and purchased 700 wood poles. Mission accomplished.
Today, there are somewhere between 160 to 180 million wood utility poles in service in the U.S. To put that in perspective, with approximately 334 million people in America, that’s about one pole for every two people. Amazing.
The use of poles in rural Iowa is a bit different than the rural Oklahoma that Jimmy Webb wrote about. Curt Thornberry of Panora Telco tells me most poles you see in our rural areas are electric utility poles rather than telephone poles. Panora Telco converted from overhead to underground lines in 1971, but he said some larger communications providers — such as Windstream, CenturyLink and Mediacom — still provide services via overhead lines in some places, mainly due to the older age of the infrastructure.
Even so, the use of poles around our nation continues to astound me, but they are just part of the process. What about all the telephone wire? More than 1,525,000,000 miles of wire are estimated to be strung across the U.S. For those of you who got lost in the zeroes, that’s more than 1.5 billion miles of wire.
All of this happened so we could hear each other “singin’ in the wire." And the Wichita Lineman is still on the line.
Have a marvelous Monday, and thanks for reading.
Shane Goodman
President and Publisher
Big Green Umbrella Media
shane@dmcityview.com
515-953-4822, ext. 305 | 
