CALL ME MAYBE

As I was tapping & swiping away on my smart phone the other day, I came across a Facebook post that asked, "Do you remember your childhood phone number?" Of course, I immediately said to myself, "Lucerne 2-7087." It seems there were many people who also recalled their phone number from back in the days when we all had prefixes since there were tons of phone numbers entered in the comments. It also got me to thinking about other dark age telephone memories.

Did anyone else have a party line? You shared one phone line with another family. If you picked up the phone to place a call & heard talking, that meant the line was in use. You had to wait to make your call. In order to call your party line, you had to call the operator & request to be connected. Yes, we just dialed "0" & a woman magically (& quickly) came on the line to assist us.

That reminded me of Lily Tomlin's comedy bit from Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In back in the 1960s. She had a recurring character named Ernestine who was a condescending telephone operator complete with all the wires that plugged into the console. I loved her snooty, nasally lines, "One ringy-dingy. Two ringy-dingys" or "Is this the party to whom I am speaking?" If you have no idea what I'm talking about, look it up on You Tube. There are tons of clips.

In my own little world back in the day, telephones were tethered to the wall with a cord & the handset was also connected to the base unit with another cord. There was a dial with the numbers (& letters since you had to find the first two of Lucerne) that you inserted a finger into dragging the dial around to the stop then letting it rotate back before dialing the next number. You had to sit where the phone was to have a conversation with another caller.

My grandmother, Nannie, was one of the first people I knew to purchase a 50 foot cord that connected her phone to the wall. This gave her the freedom to roam the kitchen or living room while she talked to her friends. Of course, she had to carry the fairly heavy base of the phone in one hand & hold the large handset to her ear & mouth as she paced & chatted.

After hundreds of calls, the long, straight cord would begin to twist much like a yo-yo string gets tangled after a lot of use. Apparently Nannie turned, paced & stepped back over the cord as she became enthralled in her conversation. We did our best to straighten her cord but my mother had to drill into her to STOP immediately if she felt it wrapped around her legs. We certainly didn't want to find Nannie entwined in her phone cord on the kitchen floor. Since my grandfather was quite hard of hearing, she would likely have been there until his next meal!

The next innovation was the push button keypad that lit up when you picked up the handset. I'm not sure why we needed to make phone calls at night without just turning on a light but apparently we did. I think that push button method saved 30-45 seconds off the time it took to make a call - depending on how many 9s & 0s were in the phone number. The Slimline & Princess phones came in pastel colors & were the epitome of style.

I remember how exciting it was when we got our first cordless telephone! It was huge - I could barely wrap my hand around it & when it rang, you had to pull up a foot long antenna on the top of it. Looked like something straight out of a science fiction film. But, amazingly enough, you could wander around as you talked to your friend or go into the other room to find something. What will they think of next?

And that brings us to today. Do you think Alexander Graham Bell had any inkling of what his invention would become? Everyone has their own phone (a thin, small rectangle) in their purse or pocket & it works most places with no cord or antenna in sight. You can text people, look up anything on the Internet, check your Facebook or Twitter feeds, email friends, play games, take photos or videos, pay your bills, watch TV & sometimes even make a phone call on these incredible little devices. How did we ever get along without them?