Stories of My Childhood: The Telephone

When I was a little girl, I loved hearing my mom's stories about her childhood. She grew up in the 1940s and 1950s on a "gentleman farm" in the semi-rural suburbs of northeastern Massachusetts, and she had lots of funny and fascinating stories about farm life: how the geese served as guards, attacking all invited (and invited) visitors; how she once knocked down a fence with the tractor and was scared to 'fess up to her dad; her fear of coming to school smelling like cows. She told the story of being hit by a car in high school and suffering a broken hip. She told the story of my dad proposing to her on a church trip where the two of them were leading the high school youth group up Mt. Monadnock. She told of her grandmother with dementia asking if they had come to visit her in a horse-drawn carriage.

My dad was less of a story-teller than my mom, but he had some fascinating stories, too: How when he was very small, his parents moved into a house that had an outhouse and no hot water; how they had a goat so he had never had cow's milk until he went to school, and he couldn't even drink it; how his mother had worked in a snuff factory; how he was a "day boy" at a boarding school in high school because his small town didn't have a high school.

No earth-shaking stories. No historical moments. No wondering how they managed to survive. Simply ordinary stories of everyday life that was different from the everyday life that I was living. And I loved hearing about their "ordinary." So I want to pass on some stories of my own childhood "ordinary."

This is my first story, shared especially for my children, but also shared for anyone who lived in the same era and has similar memories, and for anyone who was born after that era to whom some of these memories are completely foreign.

Telephones worked very differently when I was young. I don't remember it personally, but when I was very small, my family had a party line. A party line is a phone line that is shared by another person or family, or sometimes multiple people or families. Essentially, it means you have to take turns using the phone. Each user has a distinctive ring, perhaps a long ring then a short one, or two short rings and a pause. Telephones had mechanical ringers still, so no ringtones or different sounds, only a different pattern. Back then, when you wanted to make a call, you had to pick up the phone and wait for a dial tone, a kind of buzzing sound that let you know the phone was working and wasn't currently connected. You would dial the number you wanted, which in my earliest memory was only 5 digits for a local call. By the time I was using the phone regularly, we started needing to use 7 digits, and eventually we had to use area codes even within our own area code. I also remember that when I was in college, the state of Massachusetts finally added a second area code, and a few years after I graduated, a third. 

We only had one phone in my house for many years. It was a wall phone in the kitchen. Our original phone was flesh-colored and very heavy. Oh, and it had a rotary dial. (I hated it when my finger slipped on the last digit and I had to start all over again.)

At that time, no-one actually owned their phone. Instead, you leased it from AT&T. It was hard-wired into the wall and required a technician to come and install it. It had a long enough cord that my mom could talk on the phone while she was making something on the stove, but not long enough to reach the refrigerator or the basement door. At some point we upgraded to a newer princess phone with a modular jack, and my dad bought my mom a much longer cord, as well as a big clear plastic gadget that allowed the cord to swivel so it wouldn't get tangled. (It still got tangled, just not as badly.) 

Now she could go all the way into the living room, bathroom, or dining room. And most importantly, my sister and I could bring the phone down onto the basement stairs and close the door most of the way to have a little privacy for our teenage conversations. 

After I left for college, my parents finally got a second phone jack, in the music room/sewing room/office, mainly because they had a home computer and they needed a dedicated jack for the dial-up modem. They did have a phone in there, but the only time they used it was when I called from college, so they could each be on an extension. But mainly, it was for the computer. 

Another important phone accessory was the phone book. Larger towns and cities had two phone books: the white pages, which included residential listings, and the yellow pages, which was solely business numbers. I lived in such a small town that our white and yellow pages were combined in a single volume, and it was still slender enough that it didn't serve the common purpose of being used as a booster seat (we used the Sears catalog for that). But we also had, as most families did, a small metal flip-open phone directory. It was basically a 4"x6" lined notebook inside a hinged metal cover. The cover had the letters of the alphabet printed on the right-hand side from top to bottom, and next to it was a little metal slider. You set the slider to the first letter of the person's name whose number you wanted to look up, then pressed the release at the bottom and the book would open to the correct page. You wrote down all the numbers you called regularly, as well as those of any friends and family who weren't listed in your local phone book. Most people memorized all the numbers they called regularly. I wasn't a big phone person, but I still knew a dozen or so numbers by heart. To this day I can still remember my mom's best friend's phone number - she was my "person to contact in case of emergency" if I ever couldn't reach my parents. 

Local vs. long-distance was an important distinction. Local calls, if I remember correctly, were included in your monthly phone bill, You could call people in your local exchange for hours without paying any additional fees. But long-distance was expensive. Rates went down at night when people were making fewer calls, so when my mom wanted to call her sister in California or her brother in Connecticut, she always waited until the rates dropped. 

Collect calls were even more expensive. A collect call was charged to the recipient, rather than the caller. You had to make collect calls by dialing "O" to reach an operator, then give her (it was invariably a woman) the number you were calling and your name, and she'd connect the call. When someone answered, she would say, "I have a collect call from [your name]; will you accept the charges?" My first year of college, when I didn't have my own phone and had to make calls from the pay phone in the stairwell of the dorm, the deal was that my parents would refuse the call, then give me five minutes to get back to my room (which had a phone that could take incoming calls but not make outgoing), then they would call me back on that line. 

The operator was also a very useful person when you needed to know the time, or if you didn't have someone's phone number. Eventually there was a special number you could call for the time, where a recorded voice would say something like, "At the tone, the time will be 4:52 and 20 seconds." (It updated every ten seconds.) My dad always called it when we changed back and forth from Daylight Savings Time so that all the clocks in the house would be accurate. There was no internet to check or Alexa to ask! And the operator could find you a phone number anywhere in the United States, using only the city, state, and last name or business name. If you weren't sure what town it was, they'd often browse around for you. For example, if you asked for John Smith in Georgetown, MA, she might say, "I don't see a John Smith in Georgetown, but I have a Jack Smith in Georgetown or a John Smith in Boxford?" Sometimes you'd get a grumpy operator who would just say, "I don't have that listing," and hang up, but more often than not she'd make some suggestions: "Could it be Groveland instead of Georgetown? Maybe it's spelled Schmidt instead of Smith?"  Eventually that service was replaced with 4-1-1 where you might connect with an operator anywhere in the country, but for a long time it was local operators who knew the area. The mom of one of my friends was an operator, and I often wondered if I ever talked to her when I called for a phone number. 

I didn't get a cell phone until I'd been out of school for a number of years. My first phone was the infamous Nokia 3310, commonly referred to as the "brick".

It had a tiny monochrome screen, played a couple of basic games (Snake II was my favorite), and could only text by using each number button to scroll through its three letters. I had a clear vinyl case with a clip that I could hang on my belt. It made me feel very cutting-edge, even though I almost never used it. I still had a landline in my apartment, and I used that much more often than my cell phone, but it was nice to know that I could call for help if I ever had a car accident or got lost (because even a cell phone couldn't get you a map back then, never mind telling you where you were!).

And that was what telephones were like back in my day.