June 1978

Phone Executive Has Magnificent Obsession

Many is the time I have cussed the name of Quatman because his telephone system lost my long distance calls.

I once attended a meeting organized to force Howard Quatman - president of the former Ohio Central Telephone Company headquartered at Lima, Ohio - to let a cable television company attach its lines to telephone poles.

City council had approved cable TV service but Quatman refused to cooperate, offering instead to rent circuits at approximately the same amount the cable company had been authorized to charge.  In effect it was a monopoly move to reserve the service to the telephone company for some future, indeterminate date.

All this background is by way of ex - atop a nearby mountain where John desecrated her grave.

It also explains why I was so surprised to hear kind words about Quatman from a Turkish tourist guide in far off Ephesus.

Ancient history is my bag, so several days of my vacation this spring were spent poking about the ruins of Turkey - older and more extensive than those of Athens and Rome.

Ephesus, on the southern coast of Turkey, was the principal city of the world back in the days of Jesus Christ.  Unfortunately it sits astride an active earthquake belt so it flourished only a few hundred years.

Ephesus is famous to Christians because so many disciples of Christ came here to live and preach.

The disciple Paul came to Ephesus in 56 A.D. to convert the pagans.  When he wasn't making tents to earn a living, Paul was preaching in the stoa (market place).  For nearly three years he and Silas, who accompanied him, sought converts for Christianity.

Paul apparently was getting through to the Ephesians for he was denounced by the metal casters and potters who produced religious souvenirs for the pagan tourists.

Business got so bad that the image makers held a mass rally in the public amphitheatre to demand Paul's execution as a blasphemer of the gods.  The vote was unanimous, but Paul got word of it just minutes before the mob surged out of the theatre to string him up.

Paul and Silas fled down the main street of Ephesus and leaped aboard a departing ship to escape.

Ephesus was the home of Disciple John, and it was here he returned after Jesus' death, bringing Mary with him.

John was not the evangelist that was Paul.  He preached Christianity more discretely and built the first church on the outskirts of town.

Mary was taken to a Christian settlement atop a nearby mountain where John built her a small stone house over a fresh spring of water.  There she lived to an old age.  Upon her death her friends - probably including John - buried her in the wilderness so pagans could not find and desecrate her grave.

John lived quietly, wrote his Gospel and built his little church.  He, too, lived to old age and was buried under the altar of his church.  In 200 A.D. a much larger and grander basilica was erected over John's church, but all was destroyed by earthquakes.

Ephesus is a magnificent ruin of jumbled columns, statues and inscribed blocks.  Only a small part has been restored.

The market place, amphitheatre and main street - scene of Paul's adventures - have been restored extensively.

Mary's house has been reconstructed on the original foundation.  The spring still flows under the floor, and visitors may drink freely from it.  Occasionally, miraculous cures come to those who drink here.

John's altar and the basilica sheltering it, is well along in restoration.  Archeologists believe most of John's body is buried below the altar.  At least the Moslems, who revere Christ and the Disciples as early prophets of God, found a body there which they said was John's.  They took a mummified right arm to the Sultan's palace in Istanbul where they encased the relic in gold with a little window so the bones inside can be seen.

Our Turkish guide explained that the restoration of Ephesus had been made possible over the past 20 years by the American Ephesus Society of Lima, Ohio.

"The founder of the society, and its main benefactor," said our guide, "was a George Quatman.  His work is being carried on by his son, Howard.  Both Turkey and the Christian world are deeply indebted to the Quatmans' generosity."

Well, Quatman sold his telephone companies in northern Ohio to the United Telephone Company and retired.

Telephone service is no better under United, and I doubt that any of its profits go to enrich the tradition and culture of our society.

Howard Quatman was a frustrating man to deal with, but he had a "magnificent obsession" that lives long after I have forgotten the telephone calls that went astray.

Author: Lindsey Williams