At the William Green Veterans Home in Bay Minette, 96-year-old Will J. “Billy” Steen spends his days sharing stories from a life that spanned a world war and nearly half a century with the same employer, building some of the earliest phone lines across central Alabama.
Steen served in the U.S. Navy from 1944 through the end of 1946, working in the generator room of the USS LST-815, where he helped supply power to various parts of the ship. After the war ended, he spent time distributing surplus military equipment. “We hauled tanks and any kind of armor that the soldiers could grab and run off with,” he recalled.
Before he was drafted, Steen worked for Southern Bell Telephone Company, later known as BellSouth. Asked whether he was nervous when he received his call to serve, Steen didn’t hesitate: “You’re doggone right.” Even though his ship typically anchored in relatively safe waters, he said the uncertainty of wartime service was constant. “You’re always nervous because you don’t know what is going to happen to you,” he said.
One thing Steen could count on was a job waiting for him back home. After his discharge at the end of 1946, he returned to Southern Bell and stayed with the company until his retirement in 1989 — a 43-year career built almost entirely around helping wire the region for telephone service.
“He and his people put in some of the very first phone lines in central Alabama,” said his son, 70-year-old Will J. Steen Jr. According to the younger Steen, crews in that era relied on manual labor and even horses and mules to string and tighten lines along utility poles. “It was a different era,” he said. “He had one job all his life. That was it.”
Steen was born in Pine Apple, Alabama, and graduated from the town’s Moore Academy before eventually settling into his long career with the phone company. Asked whether he would do it all again — both his wartime service and his decades-long career — Steen answered simply, “Heck yeah.”
Residents and staff at the Bay Minette veterans home say stories like Steen’s offer a living connection to a generation that shaped both the country’s history and Alabama’s early infrastructure. Steen continues to share his memories with visitors and fellow residents, offering firsthand recollections of Navy service in the Pacific theater and the labor-intensive early days of telephone construction in south Alabama.