I 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?

OMG, 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.

We 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.

The 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.

I remember those name and numbers numbers; posh people had white phones. My parents didn't have a phone until 1982.

hee 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