When I was a kid, you couldn’t own your telephone. All telephones were loaned to you by the telephone company.
Our phone, a rotary dial, had a sticker on the bottom that said “property of bell telephone”. My telephone number started with EM (in other words 36). When you gave out your telephone number you said “Emmerson 3, 4512*”
I never could figure out what “Emmerson” was.
We also had a party type line for a short while. You could pick up the phone and hear someone else talking.
There was one cool trick I learned. If you dialed your own number and hung up quick enough, the phone would ring.
Before the 1980s, you didn’t own phones here in New Zealand, either. I remember the black bakelite ones, huge clunky things. Kids weren’t ever allowed to answer 'em, much less use them to call up their mates.
It was a real shock of the new when coloured phones came out. And they were smaller, and had push buttons instead of rotary dials. Far out.
Then, all of a sudden, you could buy phones in all sorts of shapes, just as long as they were tele-permitted.
When the last rental left this house, it was a strange feeling. End of an era, I suppose.
Toll calls were something that had to be planned, well in advance, to make. Receiving them was something of a novelty. Receiving international ones was so rare, the whole household seemed to gather round in the same room, just to be present at the event. Even today, I get nervy making international calls, they’re so special.
I just bought a chair at Goodwill that appealed to me because of its cool mint color and retro styling…it was filthy but it was $5 bucks and I figured I could clean it up.
Took it home, scrubbed away at it for twenty minutes, and then noticed a plaque on the back that said “Property Of S.W.B.T. Co.” Judging from the style, I would assume it’s about forty/fifty years old, and just the thought of all those Southwestern Bell Telephone operators sitting in it, connecting people by hand and listening in to all their conversations, makes me happy I bought it.
It’s also made of shipworthy metal and vinyl and weighs a ton. They just don’t make 'em like this anymore.
[/slight hijack]
I think we used to have one leftover rotary phone when I was a kid, in the spare bedroom nobody ever used…but I’m still young enough to think rotary phones are really cool. People still say “from a touch-tone phone” and it makes me wonder who still uses a rotary these days.
My father, for one. One of those old desktop rotary models in basic black that had real bells. But he has it in his workroom (one of his hobbies is carpentry), and it has the only kind of ring he can hear over his power tools. Those things were loud! Other than that, though, all the phones in Dad’s house are modern touch-tone phones.
Other old phone memories? Trying to use one of those old rotary phones to win radio contests. It wasn’t easy being the tenth caller when you had to redial the whole number each time you got a busy signal. Got good at dialing though!
I remember a time in the late 1970s when my older sister got so excited to see a pay phone with a push button dial. My mom needed to make a call and my sister wanted to dial the number. The act of pressing buttons to make a phone call was such a novelty at the time.
The reliance on pay phones while out in public is a memory in and of itself. You still see them, of course, but with more and more people carrying cell phones they aren’t used as much. I also remember when pay phones were housed in a glass booth. Oftentimes they reeked of stale urine. :eek:
I remember when the dial tone was a lower-pitched buzzing sound and the ringing tone on the other end had a more mechanical-type sound instead of an electronic simulation.
Making a long-distance call wasn’t just as simple as picking up the phone and dialing. I remember still having to call the operator to put a long distance call through.
I still have rotary phones—a 1930s French phone in the bedroom, and a 1919 candlestick phone in the kitchen.
Still remember my childhood phone number: MOhawk 4-6742. They still use the old exhanges in parts of Philadelphia: my mother lives at the LAfayette exhange, and my great-aunt Ethel at the RIttenhouse exchange.
I remember in the '70s, probably around the bicentenial, when candle stick phones made a brief comeback. That is untill people realized what a pain it was to have to use two hands all the time.
I also remember those god awful fancy French style phones. Really really tacky in pink.
stellar 7 that would have been the FBI listening in to your conversations. Eve yes ivory is the way to go. But Red, White and Blue candle stick phones crack me up.
My dad was convinced for the longest time that getting touch tone on our phone line would either be a) impossible (not available in the area) or b) prohibitively expensive. It was 1993 - I wanted to get online, and, of course, touch tone was the way to go. Dad said it couldn’t be done on our phoneline. I bet him it could…
I was right.
I believe he had looked into it when we moved into the house in 1973, and never again after that.
As recently as about 1998, when I was working for an ISP in the DC Area, I remember that the phone lines in Mannassas, Va required you to pay EXTRA for tone dialing, so all our lines down there were pulse. It always struck me as being a little backwards that that close to the Telecommunications/Internet Mecca that was the DC Metropolitan area, that getting TONE DIALING was a hassle. But then again, it was Mannassas.
I don’t know if that’s still the case, I can only hope that once GTE turned into Verizon, they did a few upgrades, but I wouldn’t know.
I remember that when it first came to pass that you could actually buy your own phones instead of renting from Bell (maybe this was a result of the legal breaking-up of Bell?) my dad went out and bought a bunch of ridiculously cheap phones at Caldor or some place like that. These very special phones were push-button but did not produce touch tones. When you pressed the buttons they made the pulse sound of a rotary phone. Pretty weird.
My local phone bill still carried the touch tone surcharge until very recently.
Mjollinar, that was called pulse dialing, and it was handy at times when dealing with a dial-less phone.
There was a local number here in Houston that all the teenagers knew in the '60s that would connect you to a pre-Web version of a chat room. Lots of other kids would be connected and you could talk to each other anonymously.
I got burned by a payphone once and went to the next phone and griped to the operator. She (universally female operators then) wouldn’t give me a free call, but Ma Bell did mail me a dime taped to a postcard.
Which reminds me that when you needed a cop or a firetruck, you called the operator.
I’ve still got one of those touch-pulse dial phones.
According to a tech who has been here for almost 30 years, the old style telephone exchanges with names (Grace 5-1212, Northwest 8-1593) were the names for the central offices that served those lines (Grace Street in Richmond VA, Northwest CO in DC). Of course, not there are so many lines that a single exchange isn’t enough any more, hence the break-out into all numbers.
When I was a kid, we had an eight party line. There were literally 8 houses on this one line and all the rings were different. Ours was a long and a short.
I remember we had a neighbor who would either intentionally or not leave his phone off the hook, thereby putting everyone on the party line out of commission. You could pick up the phone and hear his television in the background. My brother, who could whistle really loud, would whistle into the phone and 9 times out of 10, they’d hear him and hang it back up. Other times, you’d actually have to drive down the road (about 2 or 3 miles) and ask them to hang it up. How irritating!
There was a funny incident one night when one of the neighbors on the party line was getting a phone call. It was about 2 a.m. and the whole house was asleep. The phone rang and rang and rang and rang. Out of the now relatively wakeful silence, my Dad finally picked it up and let the caller have it. As luck would have it, it was the operator and when Dad asked what the h**l she was doing letting the phone ring for better than 20 rings on an eight party line, she insisted vehemently and angrily that there were no eight party lines left in the U.S. (this was probably about 1975). Oooohooo, did she get her behind chewed. I learned more cuss words that night than I had heard in my previous not quite a decade…
What fun. My sister and I also liked to go upstairs when mom was doing something (preferably laundry in the basement) and call our own number. The phone would ring and ring and you’d hear mom swearing a blue streak as she stormed up the basement stairs trying to get to the phone before whoever it was hung up to keep from disturbing the other parties on the line. I think we actually let her answer the phone a few times and told her who it was…wooden spoons really hurt when applied to the behind with much force.
Then there was the time that I decided to take the rental phone apart to see how it worked. I was all of about 8 or 9 and boy oh boy did my dad get pissed off!
