I bet you have been on a party line before. You remember picking up the telephone and heard other people talking. Sometimes you had a blabbermouth on your exchange. They talked all the time. It was fun to but in and tell them you had to make an emergency telephone call.
Sometimes it was just fun to pick up the phone and listen to their conversations. It was the greatest thing ever if you had an illicit affair going on and the culprits talked on the telephone.
My mother always new when the telephone rang and it was a wrong number. If it rained and the phone had a funny ring, you had a wrong number.
Way back then it was great fun to play on the telephone. You could call your friends and try to play tricks. You could pretend to be the radio station calling with a contest that could “Win You a Caribbean Cruise.”
My friends and I did all sorts of calls to find out if your refrigerator was running or if you had Prince Albert in a can.
Answering a long distance call brought silence to the house.Just dialing that O for the operator seemed to be a great event.
My mother would get on the telephone each night at eight o’clock.
She would light a cigarette and start calling her friends. If you think a lot of news travels on social media, you never heard the news after my mother got off the phone. My grandmother got on the phone from three in the afternoon until suppertime.
It wasn’t long before we got private lines. No more fighting for phone time. You just picked up the phone and you got a dial tone.
There were still some things that were neat about the phone system. Supposedly, to trace a telephone call you had to get the police, the phone company and the FBI to come to your house and set up all sorts of special equipment. If you tried to trace a call, you had to keep the line open for 10 minutes or some silly amount of time.
Now the calls are tracked on every call, and people are getting rid of phones in their homes. It seems like everyone is carrying their own phone.
That’s too bad because some of the greatest thrills ever involving a telephone are going away. I know you have seen a movie or at least heard a story about someone that is alone in a house and the phone rings.
Some killer, kidnapper, monster or other sociopath calls the babysitter, house party, stranded teenagers or elderly person and begins terrorizing them over the phone. The climax of the movie or story comes when the phone rings and a policeman says, “Get out of the house. We have traced the calls and they are coming from inside the house!”
I really miss those days.
Now the movie will have a bunch of teenagers sitting around looking at tiny screens and not talking to each other. There is not a phone in the house to answer.
Now you have to play out that fantasy in your mind.
You come home at an odd time and the phone rings. You think it could be an emergency but who would be calling now? You are home by yourself and a storm has caused the power to go out.
My advice is don’t answer that phone.
