TIME LINE American Message Centers

1946 -- Company began as Telephone Secretary Co. in Sharon, an in-home business. Owner Catherine Marmion was blind, but she trained herself to differentiate the rings of more than 30 customer phones and printed out their messages in Braille.
1953 -- New owners rename the company Anserphone Inc. and relocate, opening offices on Rayen Avenue, Youngstown, and North Park Avenue, Warren.
1958 -- William Hunter joins the company as vice president and operations manager.
1965 -- The company gets Federal Communications Commission approval for a car-telephone license, the second vendor in Ohio to get one, and builds five towers to serve car-phone users in a 30-mile radius.
1970 -- Company adds pager service, answered manually by operators at first. Soon after, it added an automated paging terminal, the first in the state.
1981 -- Car-phone and pager divisions are sold. William Hunter buys the business a year later and changes the name to American Message Centers Inc.
1995 -- The company prepares to go national, upgrading equipment, adding toll-free phone service and digital phone service. A telephone book advertising blitz followed.
2002 -- Jeffrey Hunter, son of William Hunter, is named company president.
Source: American Message Centers