The Listeners

In Davenport, Iowa, telephone number 323-1819 rang. The call was answered by a 71-year-old woman, a retired schoolteacher. "Hello," she said pleasantly. "This is your listener." Her caller said "Hello" back, but there was uncertainty in her voice. "Is this your first call to us?" the schoolteacher prompted gently. "Yes," came the reply. The subsequent conversation between two strangers went like this:

I'm a widow living in this house alone. I was so lonesome tonight I had to talk to someone. What bothers me is the loneliness, not talking to anyone.

I'm glad you thought of us. I hope you call any time you want to visit.

You're only the second caller I've had tonight. I was getting lonesome too.

I like to sit out on the porch when there's a breeze. But there's not a breath of air moving. The air's so heavy.

It certainly is.

I guess I know why I'm so lonely. It was just about this time of year my husband died. We would have been married 45 years next Christmas.

It must be an especially difficult time for you.

The talk ranged over a variety of personal concerns--the shading elm tree in the front yard that had to come down, a son who seldom came to visit, all the small but vital concerns of an old woman in a house and a life that for many years had been too empty. In content, it was very little different from the 150 calls a month received by 323-1819, which is the number of a service known as Dial-a-Listener. At the receiving end is a rotating staff of ten volunteers--including the schoolteacher, a nurse, an author, a civil engineer--who keep the number open around the clock. At the other end are the lonely people of Davenport who hunger for the sound of a sympathetic human voice.

Although intended primarily to serve the aged, Dial-a-Listener occasionally gets calls from the young. One eleven-year-old boy, whose parents work, phones nearly every day after school, and sometimes late at night when he can't get to sleep. "I think I'm a homosexual," began another youthful caller. "Where can I get help?" He was referred to a social agency. Crank calls are rare. One high school girl rang up to ask how to divide 182 by 9; her listener, no arithmetician, was stumped.

Sympathetic Voice. This modest effort in human relations was begun last March by the Senior Citizens' Pilot Project under the sponsorship of the Scott County Commission on Aging. Unlike the numerous Dial-a-Prayer switchboards and suicide-prevention centers, its purpose is neither to deliver canned messages of hope nor to cope with life-and-death crises, but to offer lonely callers a simple human connection. The service costs almost nothing: less than $700 a year for telephone equipment and a few office supplies. Not everyone can be a listener. "We're very selective about our volunteers," says Clayton Moore, the project director. They are screened for the qualities that will survive the impersonality of the telephone: a warm, sympathetic voice and, above all, the willingness to listen.

Anonymity is scrupulously observed. No one ever knows who the other person is, and no one ever asks. "People feel free to talk when they know their friends or family will never know what's being said," observes Director Moore. "They tell us things they can't talk about to someone they know." If Dial-a-Listener works, it is because there is loneliness at both ends of the line. The listeners seem to get as much out of it as their callers. But many of the calls are like unfinished stories that have a beginning but no end. "It's like reading only a little way into a book," said one listener rather wistfully. "You don't always know how things work out."

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