In an age where most people must be within a few feet of their phones, it’s easy to forget how much phone service has changed. When I was growing up, there was one telephone in the house. It was wall-mounted like the one in the photo, except it was basic black. Even though it was over 5 feet off the floor, the cord drooped all the way to the floor. You could stretch it out to the point where you could talk from just about anywhere in the house. But, what did we do when the phone rang? Well, that depends. If it was one long ring, then it was for our house. If it was two short rings, then it was for Harold & Betty’s house. Why? Because we had a party line. It’s not as much fun as it sounds. If you picked up the phone and someone was already on the line, you had to hang up and wait until they were done. We only had two households on our line, so it wasn’t too bad, but some party lines had several families. We didn’t have this issue, but some people would listen in on other people’s conversation, which was easy to do – just pick up the phone and listen in. I heard a story of one woman who warned the person on the other end of the call to be careful what she said because Mary* might be listening in. At that point, Mary replied that she was not and hung up.
Back in those days, you only had to dial seven numbers within your area code. Area codes existed long before I was born as they were created by the North American Numbering Plan in 1947. Initially, 404 was the area code for the entire state of Georgia. By the time I was born, Georgia had two, with 404 handling the state’s northern half. We also had to actually dial the phone, a skill that is slowly vanishing. If you haven’t seen it before, here’s a video of two young men trialing to dial an old rotary phone – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OADXNGnJok. Do you have any interesting tales about the party line?
*name changed to protect the guilty