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Being a
grandmother now, I am sometimes questioned as to what the
world was like when I was a child back in the ???old days???. I
explained to my children and grandchildren that things
weren??™t really so different back when I stepped down off of
the ark. However, the one thing that has changed a lot in
my lifetime has been technology.
Telephone
technology is one of these things. It seems that mankind
has always been interested in communicating and especially
across long distances. The telephone was a wonderful
invention to enable this to happen. I can??™t remember when
there weren??™t telephones but I do remember when we didn??™t
have one in our house.
The first
telephone I remember was next door at the Mayer??™s house. It
wasn??™t anything like the ones we have today and a far cry
from the incessant tingling of cell phones that we now carry
in our purses or on our belts.
The telephone at
the neighbor??™s house was a big wooden box on the wall that
was about 10 inches wide x 20 inches tall. As a child I
thought it looked like a face on the box with two bells at
the top for eyes and a trumpet-like elephant??™s snout
sticking out below the eyes. The snout was the part that
was to be spoken into and most people seemed to shout into
it in order to be heard. The ???Can you hear me now????
expression is probably not new at all. The receiver had a
cord attached and was hung on the side of the box.
When making a
call, the receiver was lifted from the left side and a crank
was turned at the right side to signal the operator that you
wanted to place a call. At that time, telephone calls were
mostly made for business purposes or because of a need in
the family. Besides, there was no long cord so you had to
stand next to the phone or sit on a stool or chair by the
phone while talking.
My Granddad owned
a feed store in Baring and one day Grandma sent me to the
neighbor??™s house to ask to use their phone to call him and
tell him he needed to come home for something important. I
was about six years old at the time and when I made the call
a voice said, ???Operator???. I said, ???I would like to talk to
my Granddad, please.??? The operator said, ???Is that you, Pamy????
I replied that it was and wondered how that operator knew me
even when I was calling from the neighbor??™s house. There
just isn??™t any place to hide in a small town!
There was a lot of
excitement at our house the day we got our very own
telephone. Today there are so many choices in telephones
that it is mind boggling but when we got our first phone,
the choices were: A black phone on a table or a black phone
on the wall. We chose a black phone on the table.
We were told that
our new phone was the latest thing with a rotary dial so
local calls no longer required an operator. The telephone
company gave us our very own telephone number, Twinbrook
2-3485, and we were told that we would be on a party line. I
wasn??™t sure what that meant but ???party??? sounded like a lot
of fun. We soon learned that a party line meant that the
Klataskes, Sykes, Earlys, and maybe others we didn??™t know
about were on the same line with us.
It was a little
confusing if we wanted to call someone on our party line
because if you dialed their number you??™d get a busy signal
because, in a sense, you were calling yourself. However, if
we wanted to talk to one of them, we had to dial their
number and then hang up so it would ring their line and then
pick it up again to talk. We thought our new telephone was
wonderful and sure beat that long string and two tin cans
that my brother and I used to play with.
It took a little
more time to make a call then, since we had to use a rotary
dial instead of pushing buttons, but we always got to talk
to real people instead of machines.
Today the phone
companies offer a lot of options. One of them is Caller
ID. We didn??™t need that back then since very few people
ever called that we didn??™t know. If someone called and we
didn??™t recognize their voice, we just assumed it was my
brother doing one of his voice imitations again and we??™d
just tell him to stop fooling around and hang up on him.
Another option
that is offered today is Call Waiting. Call waiting is not
a new thing either because on a party line we had to wait to
use the phone if someone else on the line was using it.
Of course there
was always the party line eavesdropper. Daddy used to tell
about when he lived on his family farm and there was a woman
who always listened in on everyone??™s conversation on their
party line. One day as he ended a conversation, saying good
bye to the person he was speaking with, he quickly added
???and good-bye to you too, Mrs._____.??? He said the phone was
slammed down so hard that it hurt his ear!
Yes, telephones
have changed a lot. They may have caused the whole movie
industry to change with the advent of cordless and then
cellular phones. That??™s because they can no longer build
suspense in a good mystery film by having the villain cut
all the phone lines in two in the ???trapped at night in the
house alone in a thunderstorm??? scene. However, it seems
like in our fast paced world these days that there is no
time for building suspense anyway.
There are a lot of
other differences in our world today and I was going to
write about it but I??™ll have to save it for another story
because I have to answer the phone right now.
Pamela Blaine
?© November 2004
Pam and her husband
live in Missouri. She writes, "Pam's Corner" for her local
newspaper, The Edina Sentinel that carries many of
her stories. She has also contributed to books such as the
new book by 2theHeart, "People Who Make a Difference"
and "The Miracle of Sons" She plays piano and is an
avid reader. She and her husband, who is a minister of
music, have a gospel CD out of songs written by Pam. The CD
is entitled "I'll Walk You Home". If you would like
one, they are available by freewill donation. More
information as well as a clip from the CD is on her
Webpage:
http://blaines.us/PamyPlace.htm
Send me an
email and let me know what you thought about my story.
e-mail:
pamyblaine@blaines.us
)
??.?·?? ??.?·????) ??.?·*??)
(
??.?·?? (??.?·?? ??.?·??
`?·-?»Pamy
"Security is not the absence of danger,
but
the presence of God"
My Website:
http://blaines.us/PamyPlace.htm
e-mail:
pamyblaine @ blaines.us
"NO
ONE IS USELESS IN THIS WORLD
WHO
LIGHTENS THE BURDEN OF ANYONE ELSE" |
