My husband grew up with two phone lines in their house. One was his dad’s work number and parents use only. The other was for the kids. It was also very efficient in calling down stairs ( quad level home) to wake up my husband in the morning from the kitchen.
He is immune to nudges and " hey, wake up!" So, I call from my side of the bed with my cell to his cell on his nightstand. Gets him awake every.time.
Touch tone (ding ding) the musical phone, try it and you’ll never go back…
Speaking of crank calls…
When I came to Japan as an exchange student, I spoke very little Japanese. I lived with my nice homestay parents and one night during the summer I was sleeping in the living room since my room didn’t have an air conditioner yet. The phone rang suddenly at like 2am, so being nearest, I answered it.
The guy’s saying stuff, but I have no idea what he’s saying, so in my most polite English-accented Japanese I apologize and ask him to repeat, nope, sorry, still don’t get it, so sorry, please speak more slowly…etc.
Finally in frustration and likely near tears, the young fella on the other end of the line yells “PHONE SEX!!” and hangs up.
Poor fella, I think I might have ruined an otherwise perfectly nice wank session. 
Many houses had 1 phone period.
People often had to walk up from the basement or run in from the yard. I recall that some people actually had separate ringers (not phones, just bells) in other parts of the house, or even on the outside of the house so they could hear it from the garden.
I think my mother still has an old Bell System ringer that was taken from my grandmother’s house when she sold it. It’s a heavy wall mounted box containing an electromechanical bell and, if I recall correctly, it can be plugged into a standard phone jack.
This thread is interesting. Back in the days when you would have one phone it was usually in the kitchen. You would think that it would be beside the recliner in the living room. The only reason I could think of is that so the wife could talk on the phone while cooking, but she could just as easily go to the living room, answer the phone and say, “I’m busy, call back later.”
Think of the kitchen as the 1950s op-centre --of course the high tech communications equipment would be there.
The first telephone I remember was a wooden box mounted on the wall. It had a crank on one side and an earpiece on the other; the part you spoke into was a horn mounted on the front of the box. I was totally in awe of my mother’s ability to place phone calls. She would lift the receiver to her ear, spin the crank and say, “Mildred, this is RoxaLee; I need to talk to Virginia.” And it worked, every damn time. I thought it was magic. We got rotary phones when I was about ten or so; our first number was 4941; our post office box was 64. I’ll bet if I had to that I could remember the combination to open it. No, we didn’t have house to house mail delivery; you had to walk downtown to get your mail no matter what the weather was like. And we liked it that way.
We had a phone period, were a little jealous of the houses that had 2 phone periods.
Our phones must have beem male or menopausal. No phone periods.
I wanted the bright lacquer red desk telephone from my Grandma’s basement rec room. Not only was it hardly used and old school heavy as hell, it looked like you could phone Moscow from it.
I wanted to give it to my raving mad Communist crush. But by the time she went into a nursing home, I had lost touch with my raving mad Commie Crush. And Dad sold the house with that phone still hard wired into the basement.
My brother and I had a phone of our own from about when we reached early high school. And yes, the ability to make intra-house calls was convenient. The house was just one story, but quite spread out.
Slightly related…I used to work for a radio station and was the voice of the time and weather. People called to get time and temp and heard the pleasing tones of my voice.
I doubt many people called it though, this was only a few years ago.
When I was a kid, I remember that you picked up the phone and waited for an operator to come on line. You then gave her the 3-digit number you wanted. If you wanted to call long distance, you had to ask for the long distance operator. We thought it was pretty cool when we got a dial phone and had a prefix, which I think was BRoadway, followed by five numbers. Man, I feel ancient.
Have you checked the children?
That wasn’t that long ago. I remember John Lithgow pitching for them in TV commercials, specifically the one where he explains the change from 10- to 10-10-.
<phone geek>
Technically, that change was from 10-xxx+<the number> to 101-xxxx+<the number>.
The xxxx is known as a “Carrier Identification Code” (CIC); here’s a list of Canadian CICs, and information about US CICs.
In North America, you could access a specific telephone company’s services by dialing in one of two ways.
In areas with seven-digit dialling, you could dial 950-xxxx as a local call, and typically get another dial tone on that company’s lines, where you would then enter a PIN or a calling-card number to bill to, and then dial your destination number. This was called “feature group B dialling”, or “FG. B”.
Later, NANPA rolled the access and dialling the destination phone number into one step with “feature group D” (FG. D) dialling. You would dial 10-xxx+[1 or 0]+<the ten-digit destination number>. By specifying a CIC, you could use a specific long-distance carrier even on a line that used another long-distance carrier by default. This also worked in areas with ten-digit dialling.
But the 10-xxx way of specifying CICs only allowed for 1000 CICs, 000 through 999. So they added on another digit to the CICs to yield 10,000 CICs, and changed the 10- to 101-.
NANPA grandfathered the original 10-xxx codes into the new format to be the 101-0xxx range of codes, so everyone said them as 10-10. Later there were other ranges of codes opened after the 101; I remember seeing one place advertising its 101-5xxx code as 10-15 (“ten-fifteen”).
</phone geek>