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.