Alexander Graham Bell would be stunned to see what his invention has evolved into over its 147-year existence. After years of experimenting with sound devices, Bell was issued the first patent for the telephone in 1876 and made the first long distance call sixteen years later, reaching Chicago from New York. Who would have thought that more than a hundred years later, mankind would be able to talk, take pictures and videos, look at the weather, watch a movie or scan the internet on a small handheld device?
Talking to friends my own age brought up some interesting facts that put a slant on how the younger generation’s idea of the telephone differs from what us Baby Boomers have seen and used in our lifetimes.
At a recent family reunion, Linda Coffey told of a teacher who asked her students what they knew about the old crank telephones, rotary dial phones and public phone booths. None of the kids had any idea what she was talking about. What a generation gap!
I remember my 90-something neighbor, Johnny Coffey, talking about the large wooden crank phones the forest wardens had in their homes that were hooked to the fire tower at Bald Mountain. If a forest fire broke out, the person manning the tower would call the wardens and fire crews were then dispatched to where the blaze was burning. I have a 1930’s Forest Service photo showing all the old telephone lines strung through the mountains from Love to Montebello.
My earliest recollection of a home phone is the black Bakelite rotary dial model that sat on a table in our hallway. It was equipped with a cable that wired directly into a small phone box on the wall. My mother had to get a kitchen chair to sit on when one of her girlfriends called for a gossip session. The single cord from the mouthpiece to the base wasn’t very long and she had to hunker over the apparatus for the entire conversation. Back then, the first two numbers of your phone number weren’t numbers at all but exchange letters. I can still remember ours: WE3-9385 with the exchange standing for WEBSTER. The small cord was the bane of my older brother’s existence since his calls were anything but private, considering the distance from the hallway to the living room where my mother sat crocheting. By the time I reached my teenage years, however, the short cord was replaced with long spiral one that could be stretched all the way to the hall closet, offering a modicum of privacy.
If you wanted to make a long-distance call, you had to dial zero for an operator and once she came on, you had to give the number you were calling and wait for her to dial and connect you to your party. My friend Carol Harlow was a long-distance telephone operator for 14 years, starting work in 1959 with the Virginia Telephone and Telegraph Company in Charlottesville, which later became Central Telephone Company.
A “party-line” was a shared telephone line with others in your vicinity and taught the value of patience for anyone trying to make a call. But patience was not without some annoyance as you waited your turn. Here in the Love community, four different homes shared our same line, but since one was vacant, we only had three to contend with. Ours was a good party-line with no teenagers tying up the phone. The other two people besides our family were the Stein family and Guy Hewitt, who always called his daughter long-distance every Sunday from four to five p.m. On Sunday afternoons we learned to always make our calls before four or after five and it worked fine.
The ring for each home was weird. If someone called the Stein’s number, 943-7203, I could hear a loud vibration coming from my phone and I automatically knew Bunny was getting a call. If someone called me at 943-7204, she and Guy would know it was my phone ringing by the vibration in their phones. Also, if I wanted to call Bunny, I had to dial her number and then put my finger on the receiver and listen for the vibration. When the vibration stopped, I knew she had picked up. Like I said—weird! The party-line, an annoyance for some, was actually pretty handy for us. Before the idea of a “conference call” was thought of, Bunny would call me and say, “Give me a minute and then pick up.” In that minute she dialed Gladys Coffey, a close friend down the mountain who was on another line, and when Gladys picked up, so would I, and we could have a three-way conversation! We were Renaissance women, way ahead of our time! It seems impossible, but the residents of Love didn’t get private lines until October of 1986, when they did away with the party line for good.
Becky Howard said her phone had 13 different families on the same line, two of which were a store and a local funeral home. Needless to say, everyone picked up when the funeral home was called to hear who had died and when the service was going to be. She also said each person had a different ring. For example, one might have two long rings and one short. Another might have one long and three shorts. If our line was weird, Becky’s was wildly confusing!
Over the years, telephones changed dramatically. In the 1960s, one of my girlfriends got a “Princess” phone, a pink-hued, oval beauty with a feature that was the latest rage—touchtone dialing with a light-up dial for late night conversations. I was so jealous. But no amount of cajoling on my part ever got me further than the black plastic rotary phone on the kitchen wall.
In the late 1990s, Billy and I decided to try a wireless “Bag” phone. It was just like its name sounded, a phone in a heavy black bag that sat on the seat of your vehicle. It was the forerunner of the flip-phone but was awkward and unwieldly and never did work very well up here in the mountains. In fact, to this day, even the latest phones don’t have the best reception up here and many times calls made and received on Billy’s “smart” phone have to be in one certain place in the cabin before a clear conversation can be maintained long enough before the call is dropped.
For all those reasons and more, I have chosen not to own a wireless telephone of any kind. Or, for that matter, no e-mail either. If you want to talk to me, come for a visit or call our land line. We are listed in the ever-shrinking white pages of the phone book!
