Phones When I Was Young (Early to Mid 1960s)
I remember when I was in grade school and most people only had one phone. This was back when all phones had rotary dials. Push button phones came later. If you had a second phone, called an extension, usually in your parents’ bedroom, it was a big deal.
Getting your own extension in your bedroom as a teen meant your family was probably fairly well off. We didn’t use area codes to dial local calls. When I was in the primary grades we only had to dial the last four digits to reach someone locally. The first three digits had names. Our phone number was Edison 3762. If you dialed a set of three numbers, I forget what they were, you could make the other phone in the house ring, acting as a kind of intercom. My dad used to call my mom, who liked to sleep in as long as possible in the morning, once he was out of the shower and had started shaving. This gave her just enough time to make breakfast before he showed up in the kitchen ready to eat. Kids used to call the operators for help with all kinds of things. If they were latchkey kids — kids whose parents were still at work when they got home from school — they would even call the operator to ask for help with their homework. Most of the operators were local and really nice. Most phone calls were short. People called to make plans or appointments. Calling just to chat with someone didn’t happen all that often. Kids, especially teens, started to change that. We would drag the phone into our room and close the door with the cord on the floor underneath, and talk to our friends in private until our parents discovered what we were doing and yelled at us to get off the phone. Most phones had short, curly cords connecting the handset (called the receiver) to the phone and a much longer straight cord connecting the base unit (with the dial) to the phone jack in the wall. Later, long curly cords between the receiver and the phone were offered. This meant that once you dialed you could keep talking as you walked around and did other things like washing the dishes after dinner. Of course you had to balance the receiver on your shoulder, which you hunched up to keep the phone against your ear. We used our chins to anchor the receiver to our shoulder. Usually everyone got worried when a phone rang later in the evening because it often meant something bad had happened. Most kids walked around with a dime in their pockets to call their parents on a payphone if they got in trouble. We all had to memorize our phone numbers in first grade specifically for this purpose. Our parents had little slim, metal containers with alphabetized letters on the side with an arrow slider. You would push the slider to the letter representing someone’s last name and then pop open the cover and see their phone number written inside. We kids didn’t need to use this unless we were looking up our parents’ work number or some other official number. We were only interested in calling our few best friends. We memorized their numbers so we could call them to make plans on Saturday mornings. By third or fourth grade those extension names disappeared and we started having to dial the first three numbers as well. I still remember my best friend’s number: 335 3880. Phones were not about people, they were about houses. People would answer the phone and say, “Smith Residence” for example. You called to reach the house and then they decided if you could talk to the individual you were trying to reach. They would “call” them to the phone, sometimes obnoxiously loudly. Martin (Marty) Cooper, who is credited with inventing the cellphone, talks about the shift between phones being connected to a place (in the past) to being connected to a person (currently). One thing that hasn’t seemed to change is that people expect you to pick up when they call.
