By Sara Jane Richter
Time passes. Inventors develop. Businesses flourish and fade. Over the last 50 years especially, technology has steadily edged its way into our lives, from cell phones and smart watches to tablets, self-driving vehicles, and even smart glasses. It is all impressive and convenient, but along the way, “new and improved” inventions often replace technologies that once worked just fine. Obsolescence creeps in quietly, making room for the next advancement. New technology has a way of cutting into, or completely away from, the tried-and-true.
Into that world stepped Mary Voskuhl some 34 years ago, and today she faces the sharpest edge of that technological blade.
Mary has been the driving force behind Hennessey’s Answering Service, a business that once played a vital role in daily life. The wife of a farmer in the Marshall area, Mary decided more than three decades ago to help support her family by taking a chance that was not always common for women at the time, purchasing her own business. That gamble paid off. Mary says the answering service “made for a very busy business.”
Many readers may not fully understand what an answering service does, as so few still exist today. Answering services handled telephone calls for businesses, professionals, and individuals outside normal business hours. A patient calling a doctor at 2:30 a.m. on a Saturday, or someone needing to reach a funeral home or propane company after hours, would be routed to an answering service. The service took messages and relayed them to the appropriate professional at a predetermined time. Most of Mary’s clients were oil field companies throughout central Oklahoma.
Owning an answering service left little room for downtime. Operators worked when others rested, often from their own homes. Nights, weekends, and holidays belonged to the business, not to family gatherings or social events. In those days, messages were delivered using fax machines, two-way radios, landlines, and pagers. Today, that technology is nearly extinct. Mary says the cell phone alone has largely replaced the need for answering
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