The Telephone

I happened upon the movie Meet Me in St. Louis on Turner Classic Movies yesterday, starring Judy Garland. Hadn't seen it in years, so I decided to watch. The movie is set in the Victorian 1800s, a romantic comedy musical about a family of mostly girls, trying to make their way in what was then modern society. In one scene, one of the daughter is expecting a long distance phone call from a suitor, whom she suspects is going to propose marriage. The whole family plans their evening around that phone call. Wow! Did that bring back a flood of memories about the telephone and how much it has changed just in my lifetime! Let's see if I can remember all of them...

*First of all, there was ONE telephone company with "Bell" in the name: Illinois Bell Telephone, where I lived. If you didn't like their service, you were out of luck. And the telephone in your house belonged to the company. You just rented it by the month (automatically in your bill).

*There were wooden hand-crank telephones that were hung on the wall in some of the houses that I visited as a kid, but these were mostly before my time. In my experience, all phones were black plastic, with cords that attached the receiver to the base unit--either on a table or hung on a wall. Most houses had just one phone, and when you talked on it, you were stuck close to the base unit because of the cord. If it was in a public area of the house, everyone could hear your end of the conversation!

*Phones either had no dial (operator driven) or a rotary dial with fingerholes and numbers under each hole so you could dial the 7-digit number. Where we lived in the early 50s (Danville, IL), you only had to pick up the receiver and wait for the operator to answer. You then told her the last 4 digits of the number you were trying to reach because the other three numbers indicated a local call and were all the same. Any other prefix indicated a long distance call.

*Friends of our family who lived in a rural area near my grandparents had the phone number "5-5-ring 5"...which meant that they were on a party line, shared with other families. If an incoming call was for them, the phone would ring five times. Other rings meant the call was for someone else. I always found that confusing.

*My grandparents also had a party line but their phone only rang if the call was for them. If you wanted to make a call, you had to pick up the receiver and listen to see if the phone was in use before you could dial. It was not at all unusual for others to listen in to your conversation, unannounced! In later years, all phones were put on private lines. No more eavesdropping!

*If you called someone who was using their phone, you got a busy signal--a series of beeps. There was no Call Waiting, no Caller ID, no Call Forwarding, and no Voice Mail. When your phone rang, you didn't know who it was, and if you were on the phone, they couldn't reach you. If someone in the family was expecting an important call, the rest of us were told to stay off the phone until it came through. Period!

*When we moved to the Chicago area in 1958, the phone number prefixes consisted of words. Ours was EUCLID, abbreviated as EU. Our number was EU3-3101. In numbers, that translated to 383-3101. Later, Illinois Bell dropped the word prefixes in favor of just the numbers. I only mention this because it seemed so strange to me to have a phone number that started with a word!

*Long distance phone calls were a big deal and had to go through an operator. First, you dialed "0". When the operator answered, you would say, "Operator, I'd like to make a long distance phone call to (say) Rice Lake, Wisconsin. The number is..." There were three types of LD calls: collect, which meant the person you were calling had to pay the bill; station-to-station, which meant that you paid the bill and were willing to talk to whomever answered; and person-to-person, which meant that you paid the bill but only if one particular person was available. The operator would say, "You have a collect call from Peggy. Do you wish to accept the charges?" If I wanted to call my folks from college, I had to call collect. We couldn't make LD calls on the dorm phones. If we were traveling, we would plan to call person-to-person and have the operator ask for a pre-planned code name--someone who didn't live there. That way, the person we were calling got the signal that we had arrived safely, and no one had to pay for the call!

*Long Distance calls in those days were expensive. There was a fee for the first three minutes--the amount depending on the location and distance (and sometimes the time of day!)--then a rate for every minute thereafter. We kids weren't allowed to make LD phone calls without parental permission, and even then, we had to have a pretty good reason for wanting to! Then the family Phone Police would be ordering us off the phone when the allotted time was up. Ever try to express your undying love and affection for a long distance teenage boyfriend in three minutes? Especially when the phone was in a public place in the house? Impossible!

*LD calls were sufficiently rare and expensive that, when someone in the family called on a holiday, for instance, we called everyone to the phone to say a few words. Those calls were a family event! If you happened to have an extension phone, other family members could listen in. It was quite unusual to call Grandpa or Grandma McNary and not have both on the phone at once!

*In the 60s, Slimline Princess phones were invented. These were a bit more expensive to rent, but they came in colors. Wow! Later ones didn't have dials but pushbuttons. Double wow! Also, extension phones became more common. They were still attached to the same line, but you weren't stuck in the middle of the living room to talk. You could talk on an extension in a more private setting.

*Somewhere along the line, phone service was de-centralized. "Ma Bell" had competition. Phone companies cropped up all over the place. Then came Call Waiting, and Caller ID, and all of those other amenities that make phone use so convenient. Then came the Internet. Personal computer became the norm and modems were connected through the phone line. If you got a call, it knocked you offline unless you disabled incoming calls until you were done "surfing the Net". That brought a rise in requests for second phone lines that could be dedicated as a "data line" only. And that, in turn, started the competition for phone and computer "bundled" rates. Now, I have unlimited long distance phone privileges. I can call anywhere in the country for no added fees. Unheard of!

*Cell phone technology came about as a result of amateur radio technology. In the beginning, only rich people had "mobile" phones, and they were the size of bricks! Now, they are smaller, wireless, and EVERYONE has them. They really aren't phones at all, but little radios that can do just about anything but brush your teeth for you. With them, you can take still photos, make videos, place phone calls, surf the Internet, read bar codes, locate where you are with a GPS installed--you name it. You aren't tethered to a cord. And, if you are a teenager, your entire social life depends on them!

I'm probably forgetting something. When I think of how much the telephone has changed just in the last 65 years, I really feel like an old fogey!