Phone, phones, phones!

Phone, phones, phones!

My parents grew up at a time when telephones were something new. My mom's family lived in the country and they had a "party line". Other people on your line could pick up their phone and listen in on your conversation. And you didn't have a "number". You had a number of rings! Like two longs and a short or whatever. Keeping secrets was almost impossible!

When I was a kid, my folks had one phone. It was big and black and it sat on the "telephone table" (which had a little matching chair) by the back hallway. If you wanted to know where the fire engine just went, you dialed "O" for Operator and the lady in the little brick building that was three blocks away would answer and tell you where the fire was.

Yes, I said "dial". There were no pushbuttons and it took a LONG time to dial a number like 507-899-9989 because you had to wait each time for the dial to return to the zero before dialing the next number.

Oh! You could also call and ask her for the correct time! I miss that personal operator's voice. She knew who you were, too!

When I was a little older in the 50's, my cousin and I would visit her grandmother who couldn't hear very well. If her grandmother was napping or went outside, we would play a naughty little game.

We would look up numbers of people in the next town that weren't "long distance", call them and then say naughty words like "damn" and "hell" (we didn't know any other ones) and then hang up! Oh, what a thrill that was! That was long before Caller ID, of course. We would have been spanked if our parents had found out!

When we first got married and the four years that John was in the Marine Corps, we didn't have much money and long distance phone calls were expensive! So you didn't just call somebody on a whim. There had to be a good reason and it had better not be too often, and you kept your calls short! Most of the time you wrote LETTERS!!!

In the 70's, push-button phones became available and the Local Operator became a thing of the past.

When John went to Japan in 1971, he called me maybe three times via a radio-phone hookup. Those calls were extremely expensive! I remember one call that lasted a little less than ten minutes cost $75 !

After we moved back to Buffalo Center in 1973, we ended up getting two lines because he had a livestock buying and hauling business. So we had a phone for each line in each location... two in the north living room, one in the south living room, one in the kitchen, one in the sun room, one in the upstairs bathroom, one in the downstairs bathroom, and one by each side of our bed.

In the 80's, my husband had one of the first mobile telephones called a "bag phone" because he was a trucker. He said they had the best reception and he never once had a dropped call. He said they were the best because they used analog towers.

Eventually, he got a regular digital cellphone. It must have been about 2007 that he thought I should have a cellphone, too. I got one that had rhinestones glued all over it, but I hardly ever used it because the company we had at the time didn't give me coverage in my store so I mostly left it at home.

We tried ALL the companies and eventually stayed with Verizon Wireless because they really do have the best coverage and plan for us. And they were the only company that I could get coverage in my building uptown.

It wasn't long and I had mastered that little piece of technology and even moved on to texting. I love talk-to-text, but sometimes it types an entirely different word than the one I said. Like when I SAY "Can you come to our Quasquicentennial celebration?" My phone will think that I said, "Can you come to our quiet squeeze centennial celebration? Actually, that sounds like that might be kind of interesting!

How far we have come in a little over a hundred years... I wonder what will be next and who will grow up to be the next "Alexander Graham Bell" of his or her generation!