Telephone Tale

Wherever I am, I have a telephone close at hand, usually in my pocket, or occasionally, like right now, it's sitting on the desk next to my keyboard.  Its a little thing, measuring 1¾" by 4" by ½" and slides apart to make a call, preventing what some describe as "Butt Dialing."   I don't use it a lot, I really don't like talking on the telephone very much.  I spent much of my working life on a telephone explaining things, buying things, selling things, managing things, or occasionally talking to sweet things.   Now that I'm retired and living with my sweet thing, I have little use for one.  Our house isn't huge like those McMansions developers are hoping Americans will continue buying, but whether I'm in my my shop or my home office, my wife and I will occasionally communicate by phone, just to prevent having to look throughout the entire house and yard.

I didn't always have as phone in my pocket.   When I was but four years old, my parents bought a home nestled in the woods in mountainous rural New Hampshire.   It was in a clearing on top of a small hill in the middle of a wide valley and had a well, a septic tank, three bedrooms, one bathroom, a living room, dining room and kitchen, and a telephone.   The telephone was an oak box, rectangular in shape, with a mouthpiece that stood out from the face of the box, two round, metal cup-shaped bell with a clanger between them, an earpiece that hung in a cradle on the left side, and a hand crank on the right side.   Below the mouthpiece was a small desk that could hold pads of note paper.

The telephone was mounted on the wall in the entry hall at just the right height for an adult to use easily.  Kids didn't use phones back then, but we knew how. To make a call, you'd first lift the earpiece and check to see that nobody else on the party line was using it.  Then you'd hang up, give that hand crank a sharp twist, and then pick the earpiece back up.  In a moment or so, the operator would say, "Number, Please"

You'd tell her what number you wanted to call and after some rather mysterious clicking sounds, someone at the home you were calling would answer.

To answer a call, you'd first listen to the ring pattern to make sure it was your number, because on party lines, the phone would ring whenever anyone on the line got a call.  We were fortunate in that there was only one other family on our line and their two daughters were not allowed to have calls.  That wasn't unusual in small towns in the the 1950's.  If you wanted to talk to someone, you went to their house.

Our telephone number was 20-3, pronounced "two oh ring three" and the Douglass' number was 20-2.   Their ring was two short rings and ours was one long and one short.  When the phone would ring, you'd listen to the pattern to see if you needed to answer.  In today's world of constant communication, can you imagine the cacophonous confusion that would cause?

You could place a call anywhere in the village for no charge (other than the monthly bill), but there was a long distance charge to call the next towns, such as Cornish, 3 miles away and Lebanon, 8 miles away.

The family owned telephone business of my old home town is fairly well known in the annals of rural communications.  In 1897, just 21 years after Al Bell made that famous first telephone call, Harold Chellis installed a telephone wire from his home to that of his cousin, Alvah Chellis, several miles away.  In the next seven years, the telephone system grew to twenty-five subscribers, all run from the Chellis home.  Eventually a switchboard had to be installed in the Chellis dining room and remained there until it was moved to a separate room off the kitchen.  Harold's wife, Mary, was the chief switchboard operator, and remained so until she was quite old.  Other ladies of the village were hired to operate the switchboard, but until an automated system was installed in 1973, it was run from that little room off the Chellis kitchen.

In the those days, the Chellis family would celebrate holidays in their home with the whole family, so if you made a call at meal time, the operator would often be one of the family rather than Mrs Chellis or one of the standard operators.   After all, there'd be no need to pay an operator when everyone in the family knew how to operate the switchboard.

As outdated as it sounds, the system featured call forwarding long before it became available in other type of telephone systems.  One Christmas when I was living in a barracks on a North Dakota USAF radar base, I put in a "collect" call to my folks.  For the younger readers, a "collect" call was one in which the person being called paid for the long distance call, not the caller.  By the time of this anecdote, most telephone systems around the country had been modernized, so I had to tell the operator at my end of the line how to go about making the call.  I told her I wanted to make a collect call to Meriden, NH for anyone at two oh ring three and that it was a "ring down" through White River Junction, VT.  After a few moments and several clicking noises, I heard an operator say, "White River."  My operator told her that she had a collect call for two oh ring three in Meriden NH and the White River operator responded with, "One moment, please."  There were some more of those clicking sounds, and then a familiar female voice said, "Meriden."  My operator said her spiel again and that familiar voice responded, "Jimmy, they're not at home.  They've gone up to your grandfather's.  I'll put it through there.  Merry Christmas."  Call fowarding with a personal touch.