ELDRIDGE — Mark Harvey’s homecoming in November came with one great regret. Hired to return to his roots with Central Scott Telephone & CS Technologies, the 48-year-old was unfortunately unable to share the celebration as the president and CEO of the 120-year-old local company with one of his predecessors. Mr. Harvey’s dad, W. Norman Harvey, […]
Already a subscriber? Log in
Want to Read More?
Get immediate, unlimited access to all subscriber content and much more.
Learn more in our subscriber FAQ.
- Unparalleled business coverage of the Iowa City / Cedar Rapids corridor.
- Immediate access to subscriber-only content on our website.
- 52 issues per year delivered digitally, in print or both.
- Support locally owned and operated journalism.
ELDRIDGE — Mark Harvey’s homecoming in November came with one great regret.
Hired to return to his roots with Central Scott Telephone & CS Technologies, the 48-year-old was unfortunately unable to share the celebration as the president and CEO of the 120-year-old local company with one of his predecessors.
Mr. Harvey’s dad, W. Norman Harvey, who led the Eldridge-based business from 1963 to 2007, died nine months earlier in February at the age of 87.
“Norm,” as he was known, worked more than 50 years for Central Scott. He was hired as a lineman on Jan. 1, 1957 — three months before the Eldridge and Long Grove Telephone Companies merged to form Central Scott.
And even after retiring in April 2007, Mr. Harvey’s father continued serving as chairman of the board, with the July 2015 acquisition of Dixon Phone Company among his final professional acts.
In between, among other highlights, “Norm” oversaw the change from party lines to one-party service in 1968; the purchase of McCausland Telephone Company in 1979; and the formation of CS Technologies in 1997 to provide long-distance service.
“We think we’re changing the world now and how many times had he done that?” the new president said when thinking about the company’s latest improvement — installing fiber-optic lines for high-speed internet service.
“When I was managing other companies, every time I’d say to him, ‘Boy, this doesn’t look good. This could be the end of the industry and the end of this company.’ He’d always say, ‘Well, you know how many times I’ve seen the world end in my lifetime? And it hasn’t happened yet.’
“Speaking of the telecommunications or the broadband world now, there’s a lot of times this is going to be the end. And he’d always say, ‘You push through it. You do what’s right for the right reasons and everything will be OK.’ And that’s really what we’re doing here now — it’s what needs to be done and we have the right reasons to do it.”
Even without this latest improvement, the second-generation leader has had a monumental career himself.
After growing up in the industry as a kid — and earning a two-year degree in telecommunications from Des Moines Area Community College (DMACC), his first full-time paycheck came soon after graduation in January 1994 as an installation repair technician for Central Scott.
“I remember us installing our first dial-up (internet access) at 56K and even slower than that, and having engineers tell us that no one will ever use over a megabit. We won’t ever have to worry about it,” Mr. Harvey recalled with a laugh.
“Now, we’re looking at a Gigabit —which is 1,000 megabits — to people’s homes. In one career, it’s amazing to go from dial-up to the speeds we’re delivering today.”
In between, Mr. Harvey worked nine years at Central Scott before traveling north up U.S. Highway 61 to manage Grand Mound Communications for four years. Mr. Harvey then moved to Dysart, Iowa, to manage three telephone companies at once for 11 years before taking over at Mi-Fiber in the Des Moines area in 2018.
His Nov. 7, 2022, return to Eldridge was made possible when Donn Wilmont retired after nearly 13 years as the Central Scott CEO.
“It feels good to be back,” Mr. Harvey said. “Some things are extremely familiar but then after 19-plus years away, a lot of things have changed also.
Mr. Harvey said the biggest change seen during his career is easy to peg.
“This probably dates me, but I’m surprised at the amount of businesses that cannot function if they don’t have internet service, if it goes down,” he said. “So, we’re seeing a lot of businesses get redundant services just because they can no longer function without the Internet.
“So, the reliance on the internet is the biggest change to me — especially from seeing a time when no one had it to now you have to have it to survive.”
On the flip side, Mr. Harvey has come across hand-typed contracts in file folders during his many moves and wonders how his father’s generation ever functioned.
“You think, ‘How much did that have to go back and forth?’ as we e-mail our attorneys or consultants,” he said. “All of that had to be put in the mail, but now something that took weeks takes maybe 15 minutes.”
However, Mr. Harvey said he and his wife Tara get caught in some antiquated behavior from time to time by their daughters Brianna and Brooklyn.
“Making a dinner reservation or ordering from somewhere is a great example,” Mr. Harvey said. “We’ll say, ‘Oh we should call them,’ and start looking up the number, but then the kids have the answer up on their phone or have an app downloaded to make the order. Or they have it already taken care of just because they don’t know the difference. It’s amazing to think they have grown up without ever knowing a time without the Internet.”
Like his father, though, Mr. Harvey has persevered by being progressive, embracing change and rolling with the punches.
“Back before I left in the early 2000s, I was replacing lines that my dad and his generation put in,” Mr. Harvey marveled.
“So now deja vu comes around as I come back and we’re replacing lines that I was part of putting underground 20-plus years ago. It’s amazing to see that time goes extremely fast. You don’t think that was very long ago, but now they’re out of date and the world’s moving on.”
