I reread the message B.I. Webb sent me and realized I'd made a mistake in the previous post (below). I'm not sure where the very first telephone office was - it may have been in the Imperial Company offices since there were just two phones in town: one in W.T. Eldridge's residence and the other inside the refinery.
I now realize that the telephone office before the one in the red-brick building at the Main Gate was in the same building that housed the Sugar Land Drug Store, the doctors' offices, and the dentist's office. Here is a picture of the exterior of that building. It comes from the Jane McMeans photo collection.
(Update) Beverly Friend Wappler sent me a note that contained this comment about the telephone office shown in the picture below: "These (pictures) really bring back old memories. Yes, I remember when the phone office was above the drug store..........as a matter of fact, I had been up there to see my mother and fell down those stairs from the second stair at the top! I was probably 9 or 10 as I recollect. It skinned me up a bit, but my main concern when I hit bottom was if anyone had seen me fall!! I was embarrassed!"
Just to confuse you even more, I thought I'd post a picture of the interior of the telephone office on Highway 90A, now Windstream's office. (You can see an exterior shot of the building in the next entry.) The people in this picture are Robert Hill (left), Tom James (standing next to him), and Mildred Rozelle sitting at the desk. You can see Etna Schindler sitting at the long-distance switchboard behind the glass wall. Jackie James allowed me to use this photo, which comes from her family collection.
