The telephone number of my youth was Manhasset 7-5151.
Area codes didn’t arrive until the mid-60s. Most people only had one line before that, and possibly, a telephone on each floor of their homes.
We had a wall-phone in the finished basement, another on a wall in the kitchen and a third - a black, desk phone - in my parents’ bedroom. The kids weren’t really allowed to use this one. It sat on a mahogany “telephone table” that had a matching chair. Most of the homes I visited had one of these some place.
All had dial phones, of course, and dial we did.
Since there was no “call waiting,” the caller had to dial and redial, then redial, again and again, to get through to a friend with a busy signal.
I was capable of doing this hundreds of times, if the message I needed to convey to a friend was important enough, as all seemed to be.
MA 7-2268. MA 7-2268. MA 7- 2268. Endlessly my index finger turned that dial.
The girls in that house never got off the phone.
The same was true of my beloved friend, MA 7-4408, who had three sisters. It was virtually impossible to get through to her, and if one of her older sisters answered, she was likely to say my friend wasn’t allowed to come to the phone.
The father of these four beauties finally succumbed to installing a telephone, with a separate number just for the girls, on the landing at the head of the stairs. He often said the plastic handle was going to wear out in record time because the phone was in perpetual use.
Just as a case in point, in most Baby Boomer homes the telephone was a family item, used in a communal space.
“Don’t you whisper into that phone!” was a common remark cast toward a kid whose phone cord couldn’t be stretched far enough away from an adult.
I resorted to speaking “Double G” with my friends when on the phone in the presence of authority.
I had trouble passing French quizzes, but I knew this language by heart.
“Whitta-gut ditta-gid yitta-goo gitta-get kitta-galled titta-goo thiitta-ghee itta-goff-itta-giss fitta-gor?” I’d say into the receiver in a clear voice.
This drove my mother insane.
So my 1959 Christmas list included Ma Bell’s new “Princess Phone” for Santa to install in the room my sister and I shared.
“It’s little...it’s lovely...it lights.”
Marketed as a bedroom phone, the sleek design allowed it to be placed easily on a nightstand, and it came in pink.
The Princess didn’t appear under our tree, but MA 7- 0146 got one and there was truly nothing like it. I started going to her house just to have the Princess Phone experience.
Back at my house, the favored phone was outside the basement laundry room near our
brand-new Magnavox TV. The phone had a long cord, so even if people were watching television, I could snake into the adjacent laundry room to have some privacy.
Sometimes, I could even close the door.
I needed to be alone because my friends and I had discovered, at the age of 12, “party lines.”
I’m sure there was more to the party than the game we created on these open lines which delivered constant static when we connected to them. Somehow, we avoided the complication because we had our own agenda.
Kids hollered over the noise to each other.
It was like getting in touch with another planet. You’d hear people shouting phone numbers over and over. Then they’d hang up to see who’d call them.
My friends and I quickly realized we could scream anyone’s phone number into that static.
So we did.
We repeated the numbers of the St. Mary’s convent and Church rectory which we already knew by heart from all the prank calls we’d dialed their way (no *69 then).
“Is your refrigerator running, Sister?” Ha- ha.
Can kids perform prank calls these days? I’m not sure.
What a shame. There’s nothing like a harmless prank call that works.
Like calling a number and telling the person you’re from the telephone company and men are working on some extremely important lines close by, so please don’t answer the phone if it rings within the next two minutes. “It’s not likely,” we’d instruct authoritatively, “but picking up the phone could cause an electrocution.”
So at 1minute 55 seconds we’d call back. We’d let the phone ring and ring. The homeowner wouldn’t pick up. Then at 2:01 we’d call again, the phone would be answered and we’d let out a blood curdling scream.
Ahhhhh. Good times.
In high school my outgoing calls from home were to girls, mostly. It was a day and age when girls didn’t call boys.
Girls waited by the phone for boys to call us. It was grueling. I waited often.
We only called a boy to see if his line was busy which might explain why he wasn’t calling us. But a perpetually busy line meant so many things: was a female on the phone in his house, or was he on the phone with MA7 - 2259?.
There was another important rule to this phone etiquette: If the boy’s phone rang and someone answered, we’d hang up.
Since I had an older brother, I knew first-hand how this drove parents crazy.
We’d hear our mother speaking into a void: “Hello...Hello? Oh, not this again. Please either stop calling or speak up...”
The phone was as central to our existence then as it is to teens today; but the phones we used were installed in the walls and the numbers we called had limited availability, imposed by humans as well as technology.
For instance, each day I called the same circle of girlfriends the minute I got home from being with them at school.
It was time-consuming to reach one of them
When I got ‘a busy’ from MA 7- 2268 and MA 7 - 2259, I figured they were talking to each other. I made this deduction because MA 7 - 7132 was grounded, and I’d called MA 7 - 4408, only to be told she wasn’t allowed to come to the phone because it was “homework time.”
See, the main difference with the phones of the Baby Boomer years was, a parent could answer the phone and deliver ultimatums or pick up an extension and say: “I told you to get off the phone and come to dinner.”
I never had a friend whose parents didn’t do that.
Even MA 7- 0146‘s Princess phone and the four beauties with the private number found themselves without instruments from time to time. Their fathers, fed up with the constant jabbering, had each been known to unplug the four-pronged jack from the wall, insuring silence for awhile.
Somewhere along the line, I lost my fascination with spending time on the phone. It may have started at 40 when I didn’t have my mom to call anymore, but it ended for sure when my sister
was no longer there to share events with.
We got rid of the landline at our house a few years ago. Only telemarketers called that number.
So I only use my cell phone now.
I have to say, I don’t find the architecture of my iPhone particularly comfortable for lengthy conversations, and besides, we’re still asking: “Can you hear me now?” no matter the server or instrument.
My kids tell me they use phone calls for business mostly, otherwise they text their friends. I like texting, too, but it certainly has its limits.
I imagine we’ll all be Skyping and using Face Time more in the future, which in my case requires make up.
At that point, I’ll be longing for the days when we could pull the wall phone’s long cord into the laundry room and get a little privacy.
H
