Subscriber Triumphant

"Dial message registers are so designed that they cannot operate unless the distant telephone answers. The answer of the distant station is just as necessary to operate the register as the turning of the switch to light a lamp. . . . One hundred thousand inspections made showed accurate operation in 998 cases out of each 1,000. . . . The inaccuracy was an error in subscribers' favor."

When Vice President Victor Cooley of New York Telephone Co. made these remarks a bit nervously last week, he was expressing more than the viewpoint of a $4,900,000,000 corporation. He was paraphrasing the rationalization with which the average telephone subscriber each month consoles himself for failing to act upon his instinctive suspicion that the company is robbing him.

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Alton Smahl was born in New York, in 1898. In 1921, he was graduated from Fordham Medical College, became an interne at Englewood, N. J. After a year of work for U. S. Public Health Service, Dr. Alton A. Smahl set up an office of his own in Manhattan, began practice as an otolaryngologist. He inserted the initial A. to make his name sound better. He married, became the father of a daughter, spent a year in Vienna doing post-graduate work.

In 1926 Dr. Smahl began to keep a record of his telephone calls. The first month, he counted 45. His bill charged him for 67, one more than his flat-rate allowance. Dr. Smahl complained. The telephone company at first cut his rate for extra calls in half. As officials became more familiar with Dr. Smahl's triangular face, beady eyes and beak nose, they grew less sympathetic.

Last June, Dr. Smahl grew weary of his records and complaints. He bought himself a padlock and put it on his dial to assure himself that no one else could turn it. This time, he refused to pay the difference of $1.10 between his record and the bill.

In July, he refused to pay an overcharge of 35 cents. By November, the difference between what Dr. Smahl thought he owed and what the company claimed amounted to $5.40. The company cut off his service. After three days, Dr. Smahl called on his lawyer, who advised him to settle under protest and then file suit. He did so.

Last week, the case of Dr. Smahl v. the New York Telephone Co. came up for trial. In Manhattan's dingy Central Municipal Court before Justice George L. Genung sat some 15 company witnesses, operators, engineers, accountants and inspectors. Dr. Smahl had a single witness, a onetime secretary. The company brought in records photographed by its automatic cameras. Accountants testified that, because Dr. Smahl had always been a nuisance, individual records had been kept in his case which agreed with the company's routine records. Engineers testified that Dr. Smahl's little padlock was insignificant; even with a locked dial the instrument could have been used by removing the receiver and jiggling the hook. A jury of six men, after an hour's deliberation, decided the historic case for Dr. Smahl, awarding him a verdict of $5.40 against the telephone company.

If Dr. Smahl had been what the telephone company considered him, a mercenary pee-wee and crackpot, he would have accepted the verdict and quit. But said the man who had suddenly become a hero for millions of telephone subscribers: "I like to die fighting." He declared he had spent $3,000 in his seven-year fight against the telephone company, accused it of stealing $30,000,000 every year from its patrons by overcharges which they were helpless to rectify. Said Dr. Smahl: "There's such a thing as the pioneer spirit. If a man's worth being called an American citizen, it's up to him to fight every injustice he sees. . . ."

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