A New Fangle Telephone

Believe it or not, until I was in 6th grade we had a telephone that hung on the wall. That may not sound too unusual, but it looked like the ones you now see in museums. As a matter of fact, my mom kept it, refinished it, and has it hanging on her kitchen wall.

For you youngsters, let me explain. The phone hung on the wall so that the mouthpiece was at the height of a normal adult's mouth. Hence, you could speak into it in a normal voice; that is, most of the time. If the weather was bad, the reception was terrible and you had to practically shout to be heard. For us kids, we had to keep a chair nearby to stand on when we got the privilege to speak on the phone.

The earpiece was attached to the phone by a cord, and you had to hold it in your hand to hear the other person; that is, when the weather was good. Having to speak into the mouthpiece and hold the earpiece while standing on a chair was difficult enough as a child, but you also had to "ring up" the operator to place a phone call. You had to turn the handle on the side for a few seconds and hope that the operator in town wasn't too busy with other calls to connect you with the party you wanted. Needless to say, we didn't use the phone unless the message was important.

Another part of that phone system which is almost forgotten is the party line. How many of you have ever heard of that? I don't claim to understand the logistics of it, but we were told that they couldn't run individual lines to every home in the country. Therefore, we had a party line with several families on the same line--another reason why we didn't use the phone unless it was urgent.

Each family had their own distinctive series of rings (ours was 3 short and 3 long), but that series rang in every home every time a call was sent to the party line. Sometimes, it became annoying when the proper family didn't answer and the phone kept ringing. However, the enjoyable part of it was that we could pick up the phone and listen in on their conversation, and they couldn't do anything about it but tell us to get off the line. Technology was not available to let them know who was listening, so they didn't even know with whom to get angry.

The most fun I ever had with a party line was at Grandma Goodwin's house. Since they lived in NE Oklahoma miles from civilization, they had very little to do that was much fun for an ordinary kid, but I wasn't any ordinary kid. Whenever Grandma knew that a neighbor was getting a call, she was quite sly about picking up the receiver quietly so that no one would know she was listening. I can still remember her motioning me to be still so that no one would hear me in the background. Consequently, she always had news to share with others about her neighbors. I will be sure to tell you more about my grandma in future posts. She was a unique lady.

Anyway, it was some time in 1960 or 1961 when we had our first rotary dial telephone installed. How many of you remember those? We still had a party line, but we could place our own calls without going through the operator; that is, unless the call was long distance. For the first time, I could actually place my own calls, but if they became too long another party might interrupt to say that they had a more important call to make.

I Became a Royal Pain

As nearly as I can remember, 5th Grade was the year I discovered my love of softball/baseball, but I don't actually recall how it came about. At recess, I had begun playing softball with the boys around 4th grade because I found that much more invigorating and challenging that just running around the playground with the girls. I don't think the boys liked it at first, but gradually they accepted me because my abilities weren't too much of a detriment. I practiced with my sister at home as much as I could. After all, we had an acre or two of yard to play in.

Feeding my love of the game was the fact that it took several people to play, and I had become quite a social animal by age 10. Some of my best friends were a family who had one boy my age and twins--a boy and a girl--a year younger. They all liked to play ball, and they had a vacant lot next to their home in town. When I could catch a ride to town with my mom or talk her into letting me ride my bike there (about 1 1/2 miles), I called ahead to see if they could round up another kid or two to make the game more interesting. What fun we had!

Since we lived in the country and the closest town had a population of 500 and I needed social interaction, I liked to go into town on summer nights to watch the boys' and/or men's baseball teams play. The games weren't usually organized enough to be publicized, so we never knew for sure when there would be a game. However, over the flat countryside we could see the lights of the baseball field at our home. When Dad came in from work, sometimes I could wheedle him or Mom into taking me to town. I did like watching the guys play, but I must admit that I looked for my friends in the stands as well.

All of this, I suppose, led to my love of professional baseball. Somehow I discovered that a local radio station carried all of the Kansas City Athletics games. I was hooked! Any time I could listen, I did. I begged my family so much to turn the radio to KGGF in the car when the games were on, that my mom finally bought me one of the first transistor radios. The only problem was that the reception wasn't that good. Consequently, I had to hold the radio against the car window to get good reception. Plus, I had to put my ear right next to the radio so that the volume wasn't too loud to irritate the rest of the family. (For you younger readers, headphones for radios hadn't been invented yet.)

In later years, the Athletics left Kansas City and the Royals came in 1969. Hence, the title of my blog "A Royal Pain".

I Love to Learn

Last week I wrote about the work ethic I began learning in 3rd and 4th grade. This week I want to tell you about the educational part of my life at that age. My teacher for both grades was Miss Moore. She was an excellent teacher who had taught for many, many years. (I heard people call her an old maid, but I didn't care because I liked her class.) School has always been a highlight of my life because I dearly love to learn new things, but I think these years are when that love developed.

I wanted to sit in the front of the room so that I could see everything Miss Moore wrote on the blackboard. If I couldn't read it, I asked someone to tell me because I didn't want to miss anything. What Miss Moore soon realized was that I needed glasses. My mother said that she had also noticed my needing to be very close to the TV. Naturally, my observant classmates called me "four eyes" when I sported new glasses, but again I didn't care because I could see many things that I had missed before. Unfortunately, my pug nose doesn't hold glasses up too well so my mom and teachers were always telling me, "Push your glasses up".

These were the years when my voracious appetite for books developed. I remember being so excited when our classroom library got new books. I pored through them all. Whenever mom went to town, I would beg her to drop me off at the town library so that I could check out books. Since I had read most of the books at my grade level, the librarian would tell me when a new shipment was coming in. If anyone was ever looking for me, they knew they would find me holed up somewhere devouring a good book.

As far as strictly fun activities, I had those too. When I was 8, I joined the Leib 4-H Club. I took sewing and cooking as my projects and entered things in the county fair for the first time. At age 9, my parents started spending some summer weekends at Grand Lake. We soon bought a 16-foot aluminum boat with a 50-horsepower outboard motor, and I learned to water ski. Other weekends in the summer we went to rodeos with the Edna Round-Up Club. In our turquoise shirts, white silk scarves, white cowboy hats, and golden orange white-trimmed chaps, we definitely stood out in the downtown parades and the rodeo grand entries.

3rd Grade: I Learn to Work

By the time I was in 3rd and 4th grade I was helping with many chores on the farm both in the house and outside. Since I probably liked the outdoor jobs best, I will save them until last.

The first tasks I learned were helping with meals. My mom taught us how to "red up the table" (a country term) from the time we were able to carry dishes from the table to the sink. I can remember standing on a chair to reach the sink where we washed the dishes. I usually preferred washing to rinsing, drying and putting away. That was our division of labor.

Growing up before the days of polyester, we learned how to iron at an early age, but there was much more to the operation than just ironing. After the clothes were washed in a wringer washer and hung outside to dry, we had to thoroughly sprinkle each piece with water and roll it up so that it would stay damp while Mom was ironing other items. To keep me from ruining our good clothes by scorching them, I learned to iron by doing my dad's boxer shorts and handkerchiefs.

Most of my chores outside were much more enjoyable to me; that is, except for anything that involved our chickens. My mom loved to raise chickens for fresh eggs and home-grown fryers which meant that she expected me to help care for them. Have you ever tried to take an egg out of a hen's nest? Plus, when they were fattened enough to kill, my mom popped their heads off with a crowbar and had my sister and I pluck the feathers. Do you see now why I feared/hated chickens more than any other animal on the farm?

My dad had several hundred head of cattle which had to be checked even when they were turned to pasture to graze. Our pastures were fenced into smaller areas so that my dad could keep a count of the cattle in each one and be sure that each one was alive and healthy. Well, each fence has to have a gate for the pick-up to pass through. Dad took one of us girls with him to open each gate and close it after he passed through. Even though I liked being with my dad, the job was rather boring.

One of my favorite jobs was mowing the yard (the country term). Because we had to mow 1-2 acres around our house and I was a healthy, hearty country girl, I think I started mowing when I was 8. I liked the exercise, and I liked seeing the manicured yard after I was done. That was probably my first experience of knowing the satisfaction of a job well done.

I also liked to help my dad and grandpa "work the cattle". After they purchased a truckload of cattle, they had to be "worked" before they were put in the feed lot. This meant each one had to be branded and vaccinated. My dad de-horned and castrated those that needed it as well. My job was to keep the branding irons hot and hand them to my grandpa at the right time. (Kind of like a surgical nurse, right?) I learned where the expression "too many irons in the fire" came from. If I didn't keep the irons in the hottest part of the fire, they weren't hot enough to burn through the steer's hide and make a good brand. Then, my grandpa had to use a second iron to get the job done. He didn't seem to mind though. He always told me that I was as good a help as any man would be. Of course, that kept me coming back any time he needed help.

My sisters and I took turns burning the trash and slopping the hogs. We had a big barrel where we burned our household trash, and we took the garbage to the hog lot. (No worries about a landfill for us.) Other than a few aerosol cans which exploded in the trash barrel and a couple of hogs that scared us, we had no major mishaps.

I'm glad I learned to work and be useful at an early age.