National Telephone Cooperative Association - NTCA

National Telephone Cooperative Association NTCA is an organization dedicated to assisting small independent telephone companies across the United States. I have worked with NTCA first as a manager in a small telephone company in Kentucky then as a consultant based in Florida. My career was interwoven with NTCA and its fine staff as we both searched, many times together, to find ways to help these small telephone companies survive.

These small businesses first brought telephone service to many rural areas in the 1930s, 40s and 50s, to communities larger Bell companies refused to serve for economic reasons. With government loans and community support telephone systems were built, and rural communities thrived because these small companies brought technology to the door step farms and rural communities across the nation.

Even today, in the face of significant competition from wireless, cable television and electric companies, these small companies continue their mission to bring communications technology to their rural customers. Internet and broadband services would not be available in many rural communities were it not for the steadfast commitment of these small companies to the communities they serve.

 NTCA has walked along side these unsung heroes providing training, support, and legislative support in Washington to ensure these valuable enterprises continue to fulfill their mission to serve rural communities.

NTCA and rural Independent telephone companies are a piece of Americana, a slice of the heartland of America, that is threatened by extinction and obsolescence. It was this challenge of survival that motivated me to write a novel about a small rural telephone company. “Dial Tone,” provides a fictional look at the challenges faced by many small telephone companies, along with the drama of ordinary people caught in extraordinary circumstances. Learn more about this rare look at life in a small town at billcroninwrite.com.

Current Projects

As we move toward July 15 and the release of, “Dial Tone” on Kindle, I want to give you an update on what’s coming next.

In the early 2000s, I wrote a novel entitled, “The Song of the Mockingbird.” It is literary fiction, about Jack McNamara, an action/adventure writer who has been paid more than a million dollars for a three book deal, but he is too depressed to write and woefully behind schedule. Amid his depression, his wife leaves him and he spirals down to a failed attempt at suicide.

With the help of a counselor, McNamara revisits three defining childhood events all occurring during the summer of 1960. He travels to his boyhood home, retraces his steps, then travels to Key West then Savannah, Georgia to hobble the broken pieces of his childhood together.

In the story, Mockingbird, as McNamara begins to heal, he begins to write the story, “No Place for a Lady.” This is a story of a lost B24 bomber, The Tainted Lady, returning from Germany with the Nazi’s lead scientist on their biological weapons program. On the bomber are samples of a nerve gas and formula for an agent far superior to anything developed even to this day. In 1944, the plane crashed in the Libyan Sahara and a violent sand storm covered over the plane trapping its occupants and its secrets. In another similar storm in 1995, the plane is uncovered, visible by satellite and U.S. military scrambles to find the plane before Muammar al Gaddafi.

Bill Clinton orders a team into Libya to retrieve the planes contents. Heading the expedition is the father (retired Army Intelligence Colonel) and (active duty Army Intelligence Major) granddaughter of the Army Intelligence officer who headed this WWII mission. Their job is to get in and get out of Libya undetected.

Under the nom de plume, Jack McNamara, "No Place for a Lady" was written in 2008, my third completed novel.

The sequel to Mockingbird is a novel entitled, “Ruby’s Story.” McNamara takes in his aunt who is dying of pancreatic cancer. She begins to share a fictional story with her nephew that she wants him to write as her legacy. She completes her story within hours of her death, a story with surprising ramifications for both McNamara and his Aunt.

In "Ruby’s Story," McNamara begins to put his relationship with his wife back together and begins work on the second novel on his three book deal. This will be another action/adventure story title and plot to be determined, again written under the nom de plume McNamara. My goal is to finish "Ruby’s Story," next year. The plot is finished, and the story is about 50% written.

And finally, I am currently working on “Night Fire.” This is a murder mystery set in coastal Florida. I am about a third of the way through this story and it will not be completed until the fall perhaps, or by the end of the year. This will be the first story in the “Fire” series.

Dial Tone Synopsis

Dial Tone Summary

Dial Tone is a corporate thriller set in the mid 1990s. Sam Thompson, recently hired as general Manager of a telephone cooperative in Kentucky, discovers that the cooperative's accountant, John Stanko and, Phil Task a construction contractor, have conspired to embezzle nearly a million dollars from the corporation.

To evade prosecution, Stanko launches a hostile takeover bid to buy the company with its own money before any legal action can be taken. To buy time, Stanko devises a plan to throw the company into chaos. With help from key employees he instigates a unionization drive, and conspires with elements on the board to falsely impugn Thompson to get him to back off prosecution or get him fired.

This drama unfolds in one of the most volatile times in the industry's history. Having lost their monopoly, telephone companies across the country were struggling to transform themselves into competitive businesses, with significant difficulty. As companies struggled to reduce costs and streamline their businesses they became prime targets for unions who could capitalize on the layoffs, pay cuts and benefit reductions to recruit members.

The hostile takeover, union takeover attempt and attempt to assassinate the character of Sam Thompson combine in a tightly wound story of intrigue and conflict as Thompson battles to keep his job and hold the company together.

The Journey Begins

Friends

Since high school, I have always wanted to write fiction. I have an old three ring binder in a box somewhere that contains some of my earliest efforts that will, for many good reasons, never see sunlight. One of my first jobs after the Air Force was a reporter for for the Orlando Sentinel in Sanford, Florida.

During my career as a manager, then later as a management consultant, writing was a prominent part of my success. When I worked for a telephone company in Kentucky, I wrote tariffs  for our company and others in the state and my first effort at writing a non-fiction book gave me the confidence to try ever expanding projects. It was in Kentucky that I wrote my first article for a telephone industry trade publication, something I would continue doing as a consultant until the middle 1990s.

But in the early 1990s, I began to seriously contemplate a novel.  As a consultant, I traveled extensively and spent significant time sitting in terminals or on airplanes; I decided to put the time to good use. The telephone company in Kentucky where I was a senior manager in the late 70s and early 80s, had been one of the more interesting experiences of my career, so I decided to use that setting for my first novel, thus the title, "Dial Tone."  My time on the road, became my time to write.

In the early 1980s a series of federal court rulings, and the Justice Department's order that AT&T divest themselves of the local telephone companies known as the Bell System caused a extreme shift in the way telephone service would be provided. This meant that many small rural telephone companies (there were nearly 1500 then) lost their monopoly and were forced to allow others to compete with them for the their business. This created some very serious problems and hardships on these small businesses. This meant that all of these small rural companies had to change. They had to reduce waste, decrease costs, improve technical training and streamline operations so that they could compete and retain customers. While these changes were needed for companies to survive, many of these changes were not popular with employees of these small business. Between cooperative type companies and privately owned telephone companies, competition created very unique challenges for cooperatives in making that transition.

Of the 1500 companies, nearly half were "cooperatives," companies owned by the people who used their services. These corporations were created in the 1950s by the federal government to bring telephone service to rural areas and many of them grew into very large companies, like the one in Kentucky that I worked for. That company served 25,000 customers and provided service in nine counties.

Since the company was owned my the members, the members elected board members to represent them. The board would then hire a manager, presumably a professional, to run the business. Because board members ran for office every two to four years, and since employees of the company were also members of the cooperative, board members lobbied employees for their vote and in many cooperative's people serving on the board had little or not business experience. The political result caused interesting issues for managers running a cooperative telephone company. For example, if management tried to enforce new business practices that would make the company more competitive, or save the company money, employees could lobby the board, bypassing management and get the directive reversed. The board would side with employees to retain their vote. This political reality would create a situation where the good of the member was pitted against the good of the employee. The employees won out because they represented a block of votes that could be counted on by a board member to remain in office.

This conflict created a tremendous problem for manager's who ran these cooperatives, especially during a time of such significant transition. It was this tension that created the basis for the Dial Tone story. I created a fictional company set in Glasgow Kentucky and created a plot that would carry these internal political tensions to an extreme - a breaking point.

The cooperative I worked for in Glasgow Kentucky, while it struggled with the realities of the politics that pervades their business, they have done a fine job, and will continue to do a fine job ministering to the needs of their members. Board members serve on these boards with little in compensation and do yeoman's work worthy of praise and thanks.  While I used Glasgow as a setting for the story, it is entirely a work of fiction and does not reflect in any way on the fine work that cooperative is doing.

Dial Tone, It will be published on Amazon Kindle in electronic form in July of 2012.


June 17, 2012