In the 1960s, our phone in rural Iowa was on a party line. There was a crank handle on the phone to ring the attention of the operator.
When I was a kid in a small Alaskan village, we had the old crank type wall phones too, but no operator. Every house had their own ring kind of like morse code, Three shorts and a long or two longs two short etc.
Also, wern't there a lot of ways to beat the phone co. in Abbey Hoffmans "Steel this book". A friend of mine used one of those tricks using the payphone at school and got to a hotel in Manhatten.