Rotary Phones and Party Lines

Rotary Phone

Kids today with their high tech gadgets, redial buttons, qwerty keyboards for texting, and George Jetson-style webcams, can't even begin to imagine what we had to go through to make a phone call in the sixties. First of all, you picked up the phone receiver and listened to see whether you got a dial tone or a neighbor's conversation. You heard me right  -  a neighbor's conversation. You see, back in the day, several neighbors had to share a phone line (called a party line). If your neighbor was talking on the phone, you had to wait until they were done to use your phone. We had teenage girls on our party line, which meant we had to wait as long as a 12-year-old girl camped out on the sidewalk with her mom waiting to purchase Justin Beiber concert tickets.

Here's how it worked: You pick up the receiver, and Jackie (your next-door-neighbor) is talking to her boyfriend --- you hang up. Five minutes later you pick up the receiver - Jackie is breathing heavily in her boyfriend's ear --- you hang up. Ten minutes later you pick up the phone --- Jackie's yelling at her boyfriend - you decide to listen in --- Jackie yells at you to hang up the phone. Five minutes later you pick up the phone - Jackie's crying --- you hang up and tell your mom, who then picks up the phone and yells at Jackie to get off the phone.

After the Jackie drama, you pick up the receiver and listen for a dial tone. You get one this time, so you stick your finger into the little hole above the 2 on your rotary-dial phone and dial it around clockwise until your finger runs into the little silver finger stopper thing. When you pull your finger out of the hole, the dial rotates back around to the 2 position and dials the 2. When the dial stops, you stick your finger in the hole above the 8 and repeat the process. After spending 2 or 3 minutes dialing a seven-digit number, you either hear the other line ringing or you hear a busy signal. If you hear a busy signal, the whole lengthy process must be repeated, because there is NO REDIAL BUTTON!!!! And heaven forbid if you ever dial the wrong number!

If you're lucky, you get your friend on the phone so you can begin your gossip fest about all the drama going on at school, like who got caught kissing who in the parking lot. Unfortunately, your mother enters the room and you want to speak privately, so you take the receiver, which is attached to the phone base by a spirally, winding, stretchy cord, and stretch it as far as you can. Most one-foot cords could be stretched four or five feet so you could cook while you talked. We just happened to have a cord that would stretch six or seven feet into the next room so we could gossip in private.

I really appreciate the ease and convenience of our modern cordless phones and cellular devices. I DO NOT miss having a cord attached to my phone. I DO NOT miss the royal pain of having to manually DIAL a number. I DO NOT miss having to wait on the love-crazed teenager next door to get off the phone. What I DO miss is the sound the old phones made. I would love to hear once again the distinctive kchrrrrrrr..kchrrrrrrrrrrrrrr......

kchrrrrrr.... of a rotary phone. Yep, those were the days!!!!