Cindy..........hang up the phone!

Memories grow more meaningful...With each passing year,....More precious and more beautiful.....More treasured and more dear

I was listening to Fox news this am and they were talking about a new ( smaller yet) I pod and everything it does , having thousands of applications. It amazes me how far we have come in the last 60 years....and how adaptable we of the older generation ( ahem.. that is me) have become throughout this electronics evolution! when I was 8 year old, my parents purchased a crank type wall telephone. It was a wood box with a hand piece you hung up when finished. We were on what was known then as a "party line", which meant about 5 others would be on your line at any given time. Our calls were relayed to us from the telephone office which had a switchboard. On our party line we would have a specific ring, like two longs and a short , to recognize if the call was ours or not. It was always interesting to hear the many sounds of receivers lifted up to listen in...mom always said that was something we must never do though..and we didn't. Our dear next door neighbor, Tillie B, was an operator at the phone office. Her switchboard looked something like this picture. It amazed me how she could keep all those numbers( rings) to memory!

We later got a desk phone, that had a rotary dial on it and we were given a private phone number. If i remember right, the number would start out with letters and end with numbers. I still remember the sound of the dialing..it was a fun thing for a kid to do! as my sisters and I grew older, we discovered some new phone rules being put into effect. "No calls at supper time or after 9 pm, and limit the calls to 5 minutes."

From this time things really advanced with the phone companies. There were many new companies started and many newer types of phones.and satellites brought a new life to the telecommunications world . We had more slim lined desk phones, wall phones, phones with extension cords that you could actually walk into the kitchen and cook while talking on the phone! then came the portable phones that you could remove from the receiver..they called these cordless phones....which were predecessors to cell phones we have now...and then the I phone. What a change fifty years can make! My mom lived to be almost 100 years and I often marveled of how well she adapted to all changes she lived through...and here I am, doing so myself. We now have phones that are computers, take photos, play movies, music , help with banking, and much more...amazing , isn't it? Sister karen added... What I can remember is Mom running next door to Tillie's house for a telephone call before we had one. Or sometimes Tillie would send someone to the house to tell Mom to come to the telephone building to get an important call. We were probably the last ones in town to get a telephone or tv...Dad wasn't keen on new tecnology.A long disgtance call was 15 cents the first three minutes and Dad made sure no one talked longer than that!!!! To this day I feel guilty talking on the phone a long time even with unlimited long distance on our phone.
1/03/2009 10:51 AM