It makes for a good photo but it doesn’t take selfies.
By Tom Poland, A Southern Writer
TomPoland.net
In rural Georgia the party line was our lot back in the early 1950s. When the phone rang, we counted. Our phone rang two times. Three for another and so forth. Today’s younger set sure missed out on some fun times. Well, that’s okay. Cell phones will teach them a few lessons.
Back in the day, calls didn’t drop, folks dropped; eavesdropped, that is. Phone privacy didn’t exist. Sarah, the switchboard operator on the Andy Griffith Show, eavesdropped on Mayberry’s residents, and so did the partyliners. Before dialing, you listened to see if the line was in use. If all seemed clear, you dialed a four-digit number as the rotary dial made a whirring sound.
I suspect gossip and aggravation were at an all-time high in the party-line days. If folks weren’t eavesdropping, they were tying the phone up with long-winded conversations. “Oh, oh telephone line, give me some time” sang ELO.
Advances in switching devices, call waiting, etc., banished party-lines. Answering machines required dedicated lines. Still, party lines survived into the 2000s in some areas. Change was the order of the day. As populations grew, phone numbers grew. Our family’s first number was 3900. Our last was 706-359-4541. Sixty years stretched between those numbers. First came exchange/prefixes, then area codes.
We worked our memory a good bit memorizing numbers. No more phone books. Now you touch a name to call someone. Ricky can’t call that number, Steely Dan. He has zero service. It’s January 14, a day you’ll remember. As I’m writing this column, my Verizon service vanished. It’s a nationwide outage I hear. I sure could use that old black desk phone right now. It was reliable and all those copper wires never failed.
So much change arrived some folks don’t even know their own number. “She could not leave her number, but I know who placed the call, my uncle took the message and he wrote it on the wall.” I hope you thanked him, Chuck Berry.
Change came in colors too. I recall an orange “kitchen” wall phone, and phones of aqua, beige, pink, and red, like the one connecting Washington D.C and Moscow, though I imagine that’s no longer the case. The powers that be probably Zoom or Facetime on a cell phone.
What goes around comes around. Do smart phones eavesdrop on us? I don’t think so but two years ago I was talking with a friend in person about old black cast iron frying pans. My iPhone was in my breast pocket. Lo and behold the next time I went online ads for black cast iron popped up. The same thing happened with leather camera bags. Coincidence?
The younger generations missed the clunky old phones and cables affixed to walls. My granddaughter, Mary Beth, finds it unbelievable that people couldn’t walk around with a phone in their hands in those primitive times. That old black phone, as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar, weighed 4 pounds. Walking around all day with that behemoth would have qualified as a workout.
Now we cart a cell phone around all the time, which amounts to an emotional burden. We drive with it bluetoothed to our car. We panic if we leave home without it. Not me. Not anymore. Don’t be a slave to your phone. One of my new year’s resolutions is to leave that phone at home now and then. I consider it an act of kindness, a gift from me to me and a gift from me to you. I won’t be able to text or email or Facetime or Zoom or call you . . . provided I have service. You probably won’t miss the chimes, dings, and bells.
You’re welcome.
One more thing. That old landline phone? It was the number of a family, not an individual. Think about that a bit.