Posted on 08/24/2014 12:11:18 AM PDT by Impala64ssa
I had a Butterfield 8 number for a while.
Everyone remembers their old childhood number because it was drilled into us so we could tell someone if we were lost. Communications were far from sophisticated.
My two sisters were long-distance operators at the time when you needed an operator—no area codes. They had some funny stories and jokes. And people were always getting angry when they got disconnected. Also, you sometimes had to wait to be put through—the circuits were busy.
It paid well, but they had to work on holidays.
As late as the 1980s we had a party line. I’d love to see a modern teen or twenty-something handle that.
As late as 1978, Catalina Island in California still had phones with no dial. Calls were made through an operator.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qLU_urEYVE#t=10
Nope, not Tennessee E. Ford nor Tennessee Williams, either. Here’s the iMDB page: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053622/?ref_=nv_sr_2
We too had a party line with half a dozen other people. Privacy? What was that?
There were two elderly women on the line, they lived next door to each other. They’d spend hours on the phone taking to each other and sometimes just listening in to conversations. In the event of an emergency we were to tell whoever was on the line that we had an emergency and they were supposed to hang up. Those women took their time.
Mom still lives there. She's had the same phone number since 1960!
Mine was Beechwood 45789.
But no one ever called.
My number out on LI started with LT9. I still don’t know what the exchange was called.
We had a party line and the women down the street was always listing in. We knew it as everyone on the street knew within a hour everyone else business.
I’ve got a “cardboard” (555 switchboard) in my bedroom.
The small desktop is a good height for the bed side “nightstand”. Well, perhaps 3-4 inches higher than ‘perfect height’.
I restored it cosmetically to it’s original rich mahogany finish..
I used to have a payphone in my kitchen, but it is boxed it up and stowed away in the basement now.
Kids reacting to technology of the past, this time around, it’s rotary phones. Amazing how technology changes so quickly.
Not as fast as this example would indicate if the author knew history. Touch-tone dialing came on the scene first in about 1963.
Those were the days when you could tell what part of city someone lived in by the prefix on their phone number. Now the prefix is meaningless. We have a whole lot of people moving into Houston from other cities who keep their old cellphone number so it’s impossible to tell where anyone really is based on their phone number.
Our first phone ring was one long and two shorts with a 12 party line. Then we got one of those “new fangled” dial phones. Prefix in the country was SUnset 8 and there were only 6 parties on the line. When we moved into town, it was changed to CYpress 9-2998 and reduced to 2 parties. Don’t ever remember calling anyone long distance - which required dialing “O” for an actual operator, but wrote a letter instead. Adjusting to methods of communication have required adjusting to the most change over the years among we oldsters.
Yup...BIgelow 4
Let’s not forget 8675-309
I can still hear the tune in my head.
I’m getting my Tennesse’s mixed up. 16 Tons of confusion!!
So the story was written by John O;Hara, and directed by Daniel Mann.
Two rings? Three? Maybe four?
Two longs and a short.
No doubt kids of the not-so-distant future will be amused to remember that they had to "carry" a communications device at all, as opposed to messages, images and data of all sorts simply streaming in (and out) through a chip in the old noggin.
Progress, I guess they call it.
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