Back in the day of wired telephones with rotary dials and three-letter combinations, excluding "Q" and "Z," that took their place beside the numbers 2 through 9, there were "party lines." Contrary to what some historians claim, the party line was not a peculiarly rural phenomenon. My family lived in a large metropolitan area and had a party line, which was a phone line that we shared with a family which lived down the street. We had a different telephone number than the neighbor down the street; so, we didn't get calls for them on our phone. But oftentimes, when I picked up the telephone, Mrs. Stralka was yakking with someone. I interrupted with a "sorry" and hung up. I never listened in on a conversation -- of course, fumbling with the telephone's handpiece, dropping it, and hanging it up were disruption enough for those on the phone. And I didn't know anyone who had a party line who did listen in on the line when the other party was on the phone. It was something that was not done because telephone conversations were considered private affairs ... party line etiquette, so to speak.
In our neighborhood, only one family I knew had a "private line." Of course, private lines were available to anyone for an added monthly cost. Most in our neighborhood looked at a private line as a luxury; and while party lines could be an annoyance at one time or another, the cost of the private line far exceeded the gravity of the annoyance.
Come to think of it, the phone company charged a little more for a wall-mounted phone as opposed to one that was not. And two phones added money to the bill. And if the wall-mounted phone was a color, red, maybe, as opposed to the standard black, then the phone company charged extra. The telephone company owned the actual telephone and everything that went with it. Any problem with the phone and the phone company sent a man out; and it was a man, not a woman, who came out to the house. The phone lines inside the house were the phone company's problem back then ... it was all the same, inside, outside ... it didn't matter. The phone company was the phone company, the one and only phone company.
Telephone numbers weren't all numbers, either. There were "telephone exchanges" with names. Our phone number was MO2-4312, the "M-O" standing for "Montrose." We were nowhere near the city of Montrose, which was in another county; but that was our telephone exchange name. My grandparents, the ones who lived close by, had the "Ludlow" exchange. I don't know how the phone company distributed the phone numbers because some people on our street had a different telephone exchange from ours.
Then, in the name of progress, the phone company sent out a notice that it was doing away with the letters in the phone numbers; and, thenceforth, all telephone numbers were composed of only numbers. I know there was a notice because the phone company sent out the all-number combination for our "old" number on a little piece of cardboard to stick on the rotary dial, as if it took a rocket scientist to figure out the "number" without it. My mother, because she was in charge of things like this, never replaced the phone number insert on the rotary dial; and when I moved out, the rotary dial on the white wall phone in the kitchen still read MOntrose2-4312. As for the party line, I don't know what happened to that. A few years after I moved out, my parents sold the house, moved to a new place, and got a new phone number.
Years later, when one of the boys was playing hockey, I noticed the phone number of the contact person of another hockey club in the area -- 662-4312.
Posted by Bill at February 27, 2007 05:46 PMI made you modestly famous again by linking you in my roundup.
I remember when they prefixed everything with a name. Why did they do that in the first place? As a mnemonic? Ours was "TUrner". I can still remember memorizing that and spewing it out for others. (Forty years later, my mother is still using the same land line.)
Never had a party line, though. Think that warped me for all time?
Posted by: Joel at February 28, 2007 03:14 AMOMG, I instantly remembered my childhood party line phone number: Sherwood 35887. Even back in the middle 60s we had a yellow(?)kitchen wall phone plus a regular old clunky black one in the parents bedroom. Mercy, but you can make me feel old.
Posted by: Vicki at February 28, 2007 08:42 AMWe definitely had party lines in the coal fields. Oh the memories...
I remember the letters with numbers on the old rotary dials; however, we never had letter exchanges. Our exchanges were numbered, and our 3-number exchanges were relative to location.
My grandparents shared a party line with some folks who had absolutely no consideration for anyone else who wanted to use the phone. I was very young, but I remember the Kemp girls, who were teenagers, always talking on the phone to their boyfriends. I think they had different boyfriends every week; and always more than one at a time.
Three or four different families had to share one line. God, how I do remember...there was this one elderly lady who was not on our line, but who was on my friend's line. The lady listened in on my friend's mother's conversations with people. If something came up in conversation that interested the woman, or that she knew something about, she would join in offering her 2 cents worth. They always knew she was listening in anyway, because they could hear her breathing into the phone.
Posted by: Trace at February 28, 2007 04:16 PMThe phone in my Dad's backyard workshop recently, finally died. It was a black rotary wallmount, from the 1940s. It worked OK up until 2007. Around 65 years ... Not bad for durability. He replaced it with a digital cordless from Radio Shit. It's not the same, but whattaya gonna do? Everything's on it way to somewhere else.
Posted by: Kyle at March 1, 2007 11:12 PMI remember those name and numbers numbers; posh people had white phones. My parents didn't have a phone until 1982.
Posted by: Anji at March 3, 2007 08:17 AMhee hee Bill,
i caught this tonite and asked Rick, Husband, what his childhood number was...Evergreen20615..he was a cleve hts boy. He shared other prefixes..yellowstone, ivanhoe, garfield,etc...just thought you might remember those too.
love, tracy