I had totally forgotten about this. I can’t imagine answering a phone without having some clue of who it was
Or the phone book that was kept in the kitchen drawer near the phone hanging on the kitchen wall. On the back page (especially set aside for this purpose) you wrote down the numbers of people that you frequently called. A pre-electronic version of a contacts list.
Also, when you were staying at a friend’s house and had to make a long distance call, you could call the operator and have the charges directed to your home phone account so you got billed instead of your friend.
When someone was going out of town on vacation, they would tell you that if you need to reach us, we will be staying at The Holiday Inn in Roanoke, Va, (555) 123-4567 and the room will be in Bob’s name. Today you simply call their cell as normal.
When you needed to talk to someone on a pay phone (pre calling card days) instead of getting a thousand quarters or dimes, just note the number on the phone, call for one minute telling the person the number of the pay phone, and have them call you back.
When talking on a pay phone, some guy impatiently waiting outside, apparently having to return a phone call to the President with the nuclear launch codes, stares bullet holes through you until you get off of the phone.
Dad telling you to stay off of the phone for now because he was expecting an important call.
When I was a kid in the mid '60s, all our phones were rotary dial. I remember my mother locking the dialer with a device that prevented outgoing calls, and taking the key with her when she went to work. We could receive calls, we just couldn’t make them.
Stand-inside-shut-the-door-phone-booths are getting scarce. It used to be fun seeing how many of us could squeeze into one while making a call.
I started working for Western Electric in 1980 and we got no discount, and didn’t get one until they the first divestiture where they decided it was better to give us long distance (up to $35 a month and half of the next $65) then have us go with MCI.
Back when you leased the phones, you could get a phone connected to your line in my MIT dorm. (The only free phone we got was a dormline phone, which was fairly useless.) Between the time when the person ordering the phone ordered it disconnected and the craftsperson came to collect it, the phone usually disappeared.
My senior year I, who was the designated official phone person, was in a room across the hall from most of my friends, on the sixth floor. We ran wires across the roof to connect to 5 or 6 rooms, where people shared the bill. Then I moved across the hall to a better room, leaving the connection there with the new occupant, who had no idea there was a phone - until he drove a nail through the wire, which required some repairs.
I think they had pretty much given up on us. When five of us moved into a house for the summer, the installer. after putting the phone in, said “you can add all the extensions now.” Which we did.
The BSTJ issue which listed the network frequencies was the most checked out journal in the MIT Engineering Library, and my visit before I decided to go there was to a group of kids who used tie lines to hop from their dorm to Lincoln Labs to the Pentagon to Saigon to a bomber over North Vietnam.
Yes. Chris Rock advertised one and so did George Carlin.
We used those a ton. My mom used one to call England.
She’d dial 10 10 321 …and then a ton of other numbers to connect to England.
Is this the type of phoneyou are thinking of?
I can remember the hell to be paid if my father was calling home and we kids were chatting forever on the one phone line.
When the neighbors had to come over, ring the doorbell, and say, “Your father is trying to call home…” you knew your ass was grass.
That is very close. Hers had a brass hang up lever, and no dial. It was less shiney, and a bit bigger, I think, judging from the dial. The speaker horn was longer, too. It seems likely to me that it was an older model, from the days of “Sarah, get me Mt. Pilot.”
It wasn’t like the Hogan’s Hero model.
Tris
Yeah, back in the day you learned to answer in some sorta “it sounds a random gal or random guy or maybe a foreigner/distant relative or maybe yourself who happens to be very sick” voice until you figured out who it was and what they wanted 
I remember arguing with a friend over how to dial the rotary phone. She said you were supposed to leave your finger inside the hole as the dial spun back to its “home” position. I said, no, you’re supposed to remove your finger and let it spin freely. (I was right.)
I remember calling time and temperature over and over when I was bored as a kid.
I remember it being a Big Deal when somebody was calling LONG DISTANCE. “You can talk to Grandma for only a few minutes; it’s LONG DISTANCE!!”
I barely remember my aunt having a party line. This would have been early 1970s.
Around the same time, the phone book was still listing numbers as REgent 9-1234.
My father died in November 2008. The next spring we were cleaning out his ham radio shack in the basement, which was a mess to behold. Under the dreck was a black rotary desk phone covered in gunk. It still worked! And my mom said he had still been using it. Must have weighed ten pounds.
I used to use 10-10-987 about 10 years ago when I had to send the occasional fax to Italy.
Did any of you, as kids, answer the phone like this?
“Mahaloth residence”
Instead of Mahaloth, you said your last name.
I saw Theo do this on the Cosby show("Huxtable residence.).
My Dad had me and my brother do it as kids(the 1980’s).
0 for operator handled all of them. they were trained to get all the needed info and call all the right places. good if you were in a hurry.
Has anyone seen this?
http://www.thinkgeek.com/electronics/cell-phone/8928/
It’s an old style handset with Bluetooth to connect to your cell phone.
I want one. Anyone feel flush enough to buy one for me?
Ah, yes, busy signals. Don’t we all miss bus… stop throwing those heavy phones at me!!!
I miss having ONE yellow pages to rely on. Now for my tiny outside-New York City-village we have four competing ones that cover slightly different areas. The Internet has a ton of similar sites, but they are not the same–neither as complete or as helpful. Why would anyone want another Yellow Pages? (Anyone remember that ad?)
Yep, we used to call W-E-A-T-H-E-R to get the weather whenever you want it!
mmm
I have one of those. If I’m in the mood, I use it with the rotary-dialling app on my iPhone. 
Here it was “Children’s Telephone”. I remember seeing that in the phone booth and couldn’t believe that anyone would pay to have two phone lines and what spoiled brats those kids must’ve been.
in the days before call waiting a children’s line might benefit the parents more than the kids.
Sorry, didn’t mean to forget this thread.
My parents bought a house in this small town Northern Ontario in 1977. My dad had just started working for the provincial government and was in Toronto for about 2 months, while mom was left in this small, mostly french speaking town, with an 8 year old daughter and a not quite 3 year old son.
This house … was something to behold. It had 3 different patterns of geometric design wallpaper in the kitchen, all in red, orange and gold. My bedroom had yellow and silver wallpaper in some kind of Op-art garish radiating circles. The living room was popcorn ceilings, popcorn walls with glitter embedded in it, and white shag carpetting. The bathroom had some kind of blue fun-fur rug, (I told my brother they had skinned Cookie Monster) It was all quite garish.
But my parents bedroom had… (and this wallpaper went down within the first month, but not before the telephone guy came) some kind of dot-matrix type grayscale shades of women with bare breasts doing…things… I really can’t remember much but I think there were three images, one of a woman on top, one being done doggy style, and one where she was possibly performing oral sex on a man? I really am not sure, but I know my mother was HORRIBLY embarrassed by it and did not want to be seen as a “lonely newcomer leading phone guy into her bedroom with the porno wallpaper”.
So I got to stay home from school that day.