Telephones

[jwgh]

When I grew up, our family was one of only two families in town who had a party line. (You could get a private line, but it cost a little extra, so we didn't bother.) I believe that if there were groups of two rings in quick succession it meant it was for us, while if there were single rings with noticeable space between them it was the other folks.

The other family was only there during the summer, which meant that we had all fall, winter, and spring to forget that we shouldn't just answer the phone as soon as it rang. I assume this was annoying to Single Ring Family, but I don't think we ever talked to them or even knew who they were.

Another value-added service that we never opted for was touch-tone dialing. For a long time we used those old rotary phones that originally were leased from Bell, but they gradually became more and more decrepit (I remember that we had one that for a while if you pushed on the dial too hard the section of the phone that the rotary dial was on would swivel into the phone) so we eventually got pushbutton phones, but we still had to flip the little switch that would make them pretend to be dialing.

I think the phone company eventually just stopped offering a party line as an option, but it's possible that it was another one of the sweeping changes introduced by my stepmother in the past five years or so. She also got my father to finally buy a toaster.

Comments

[mishapville.livejournal.com]

My parents still have one of the leased rotary dial phones (but no party line!). They have a cordless but "it sounds fuzzy" so they always use the rotary one. I made the mistake of dialing a long-distance number on it at christmas, and my finger hurt afterwards.

[doctroid.livejournal.com]

I thought party lines disappeared like forty years ago. Then again, some people probably think pulse dialing disappeared like forty years ago too. I never opted for touch tone as long as it was an extra cost option; it's not like you could go broke with it, but on principle I refused to fork over money just to save a couple seconds dialing the phone. It's not like I ever was making dozens of calls a day.

Well, not until the Internet asploded. And by then touch tone was standard equipment.

[dawn-guy.livejournal.com]

My mum still has a rotary dial phone and the associated non-touchtone service. We have a "ring N times, hang up, dial again" family code for important calls and I found that if I didn't wait for the dial to spin back on my touch tone phone then the answering machine would kick in, so I tend to dial my folks' phone numbers slowly.

[thesparklychick.livejournal.com]

My grandparents in WV had a party line for years. The other people used to listen in on their conversations all the time. She finally paid to get a private.

:)

We had a party line briefly

[vardissakheli.livejournal.com]

in 1967-8, when we moved to Poughkeepsie and the phone company was behind in adding switches to our (relatively new) exchange.

I always staunchly refused to pay the extra $2 for TouchTone service, because even when it was first offered it was actually cheaper for the phone company to provide than pulse. It was finally made available on all lines here around 1987. My only corded phone that still works is a Trimline rotary model. The last nearly-working phone that I finally ditched in our move last year was the pushbutton pulse-dial phone that the phone company gave us for free when my college roommate and I moved into an apartment in 1983.

Hey, I thought my Trimline didn't have the glowing dial, but now I wonder if maybe it does. I thought the LEDs were powered by the phone line, but this ad (http://www.customphones.com/item79662.ctlg) may suggest they need the Princess phone 40V supply. I'll have to try plugging in a battery and see if it lights up!

[pobig.livejournal.com]

One rooming house I stayed at had a shared phone (I handled the charges for about a year -- awkward), a plain black rotary model which finally wore out as some wires pulled loose in the handset, so I took it into the shiny modern Bell Phonecentre downtown -- and got a new plain black rotary phone.