How They Dialed In To The Middle Class

Earl McCoy, Sr. grabbed a rung on the phone company ladder, lifting other Black New Haveners along with him into lives of stable employment at a livable wage.

He and other SNET ​“legends” connected offline to reflect on that journey, and where it’s headed today.

On a recent Saturday evening, McCoy, 59, brought together more than a dozen past and present co-workers and their spouses for a white tablecloth dinner at the Italian restaurant Il Gabbiano on Long Wharf.

The reasons for the gathering were twofold: to drink and eat and catch up as friends on the New Haven Harbor waterfront. And to talk with the Independent about the careers that they had built since the 1970s at ​“the phone company.” 

The get-together took place as Frontier’s presence as an employer in New Haven, and Connecticut more broadly, is on the wane. The company sold its flagship 310 Orange St. office building for $73 million to a New Jersey-based investor last year, and now leases the downtown property. Earlier this year, Frontier announced plans to relocate its corporate headquarters from Norwalk to Dallas, Texas.

On Dec. 2 at the Long Wharf restaurant, this reporter spoke with a half-dozen attendees who had worked at some version of the Southern New England Telephone company, AT&T, or Frontier over the decades. Most were Black men in their 50s and up who were born in New Haven, started work at the phone company soon after graduating from high school or college, and have subsequently retired. 

Each past and present SNET-Frontier employee the Independent spoke with heaped praise upon McCoy — who grew up on Valley Street, graduated from Hillhouse, lives in Hamden, and first started working for the company in 1986.

McCoy today works as a fiber-focused sales and service tech out of Frontier’s Shelton garage. His colleagues, past and present, celebrated McCoy as an important figure in their workplace lives, as someone who builds bridges between colleagues and elevates the contributions that Black New Haveners have made to the phone company over the years. Someone who connects people in real life the way the company connects people by phone.

“Earl is the epitome of charm and grace,” said Charles Nixon, who grew up in Farnam Courts and worked for the phone company from the mid-1980s through the late 2000s. ​“Earl has a mission: to bring people together, to create opportunities, to bridge the gap.” 

McCoy in turn referred to his friends and colleagues who showed up to the Saturday dinner as ​“legends,” longtime company workers and, for many, retirees who have made the phone company a better place to work over the years.

In talking with the Independent, these current and former SNET/Frontier employees focused less on the company’s uncertain future in New Haven and more on what working there meant to them and fellow city residents in the not too distant past. 

“It meant longevity. It meant family orientation. It meant career security,” said Hill native Tommy Joyner as he reflected on starting work at SNET back in 1997 doing phone installation and repairs. ​“Twenty-six years later, I’m still here,” setting up fiber optic internet service.

Joyner remembered wanting to work for the phone company as early as when he was still in high school at Wilbur Cross.

An uncle worked for SNET doing phone repairs. His mom was a ​“second-level manager.”

“She was making good money,” and was part of a union, he said. He hoped to get a job at SNET too — one that paid well, that had benefits, that was protected by a union, that he could rely on.

But, he said, it wasn’t easy back then for a young Black man from New Haven to land such a job at SNET.

“A lot of us were being shut out” from jobs at the phone company, he said. It took a concerted push by Black phone company workers already on the job, as well as by faith leaders at congregations like Bridgeport’s Mt. Aery Baptist Church, to pressure the company to hire more and more Black employees.

Webster Zackery, Jr., 77, was one such New Havener already at the company who helped pave the way for those like Joyner to follow.

Born in Arkansas in 1946, Zackery moved from Omaha to New Haven in the 1960s for a job at Pratt & Whitney. After serving two years in the military in Vietnam, Zackery returned to his home in Newhallville knowing one thing for certain: ​“I didn’t want to work in no factory.”

So he decided to try to get a job at the phone company instead.

He remembered heading over to SNET’s employment office, then at 300 George, in search of a job. He was able to get one almost immediately: as an ​“auto-messenger,” delivering intra-company mail to SNET offices across the state. He worked as an auto-messenger and then as an installation and repair technician up until his retirement in 1996.

“It allowed me to give my family a good life, my kids a good education,” he said about his work at the company for nearly three decades. He credited the Communication Workers of America (CWA) Local 1298 union for helping make such a stable career possible. 

“Everybody wanted a piece of the phone company. Everybody wanted to be employed by SNET,” he recalled about living in New Haven in the late 1960s, ​’70s, ​’80, and ​’90s. 

Rodney Diggs worked at SNET for roughly the same time as Zackery, having landed his first job as a phone installer in 1970.

“I was 19 years old and knew everyone in New Haven,” he said. ​“I couldn’t believe they would pay me for that” — driving around the city every day, seeing friends and family all over, installing and fixing phones.

Diggs grew up in the Brookside public housing complex on the far west side of town, ​“out the way,” as he and his friends referred to it. ​“Once you got in, you knew it was the place to be,” he said about SNET. His path at the company was rocky at times — laid off in 1994, rehired in 1996, retired in 2010. Throughout, though, ​“it was a great place to work.”

Charles Nixon agreed. He worked for the phone company from 1985 to 2008, not including a stint at a SNET subsidiary called Sonecor in 1984.

“I was a wire puller,” he said with pride. Getting a job at the phone company to him ​“was like hitting the lotto.” You had a union, benefits, overtime pay. But, again, it wasn’t easy to get such a job if you were Black and from New Haven. ​“You couldn’t get in the phone company unless you knew someone,” he said. ​“Back then,” in the 1980s, ​“we were scarce” and ​“stuck out” in the SNET garages. ​“We had to perform three to four times as much to get the same treatment” as other employees. 

Nixon described a 1990s-era initiative called the Ministers Alliance as making a big difference. Through that program, Black employees at SNET worked with the company to recruit more African American workers. Nixon wound up in the company’s HR department with the specific goal of making that happen. He recalled traveling to high schools across the city to encourage young New Haveners to apply for work at the company.

“The phone company was one of the most secure places to work and raise your family off of,” he recalled. He credited Diggs and Zackery with being his allies in the 1990s in making the company a better place to work for Black employees, in helping train those new to the job and focus on recruitment to make the company more diverse.

“They paid so well, because of the union,” added John Scott, who grew up on Dixwell Avenue and started work at the company in 1995. ​“They played a great role” in New Haven’s economy, especially for Black New Haveners, said Arthur Taylor, who moved from Rocky Hill, North Carolina to New Haven and worked for the phone company from 1970 to 1995. ​“You could come and be comfortable.”

Over the course of his 37 years at the company, McCoy has worked to promote the hiring of more Black employees, to promote awareness within the company of the importance of having a diverse workforce. 

He too started as an auto-messenger back in 1986. He worked installing and repairing phones, and is now a sales and service tech focused on fiber, based out of the Shelton garage.

On top of that day-to-day work, he’s also dedicated much of his work life into various diversity initiatives within the company. That has included his leadership in the early 2000s of the Connecticut chapter of an organization called the Community NETwork African American Telecommunications Professionals of SBC or, when the company’s name changed, AT&T. Through that group, he led events called ​“Vice Presidents Night Out” and ​“Leadership Night Out,” where he’d invite guest speakers to address corporate leadership and rank-and-file employees alike about the importance of ​“diversity and inclusion.”

“Earl is a sharer,” said Barbara Brigance, who was president of the national Community NETwork African American Telecommunications Professionals organization in the mid-2000s. ​“His presence and association with many of the SNET workers brought a much needed opportunity to bridge a gap between management and non-management.”

She praised him for his ​“passion for unity” and his development of the ​“Vice Presidents Night Out” networking events. ​“Scholarship programs and community involvement increased as Earl led the chapter,” she said. ​“His ongoing advocacy for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion was shown long before these became a buzz word.”

Marji Shapiro, a longtime former deputy director of the Anti-Defamation League in Connecticut, also worked closely with McCoy over the years in supporting his diversity-promoting efforts within the phone company. ​“He’s a believer in bridge building across race, across class and religion,” she said.

While McCoy speaks fondly of his work at Frontier and SNET over the years, including seeing ​“the customers’ faces, the smiles they get” when he and his colleagues are doing with their work installing internet services at their homes, he looks with as much pride on the diversity-promoting work he’s undertaken at the company, as well as at what his career at the company has meant for his and his family’s life.

He has three kids, and six grandkids. He has been able to provide for them through stable, well-paying, union-protected work at the company. ​“My check never bounced” working for the company, he said. ​“I got sick” pay and healthcare. While he doesn’t see as many African American supervisors at the company as he’d like to see, ​“things have gotten better.” And he likes to think he’s helped in his own way.

His advice for born-and-raised New Haveners like himself who are now at the start of their careers?

“Believe in yourself,” he urged. ​“Don’t be a follower. Don’t give in to peer-pressure. The sun will come up tomorrow.”