Another Post In My "Old School" Series

 I'll start with the photo.

Western Electric Model 500W Black

This is all we originally had in my childhood home for most of the first decade we lived there. It had the standard 3 foot cord and was mounted on the wall in our kitchen. These older phones were hard wired, not the newer modular versions where the phone and the cords were easily unplugged and replaced. They were owned by the phone company and charged for as part of the monthly phone bill. If it needed repair, you had to call the phone company. DIY repairs or mods were VERBOTTEN and parts were next to impossible to get. But I remember my Dad putting a longer cord on the phone. My grandfather was a plant electrician at Monsanto in Springfield, MA and got a longer black cord from one of the Monsanto in-house New England Telephone technicians. He was told to replace the cord wires exactly as they were and how to open the phone unit. My Dad did the replacement successfully, and us kids were instructed to keep quiet about it. He didn't want us to say something to a school chum and end up having the parent working for the phone company. The phone company might check the records and find we weren't paying for a long cord... THE HORROR! No wonder AT&T had to get broken up back in 1984, the freakin' fear they instilled in people!

Anyway, we had an extension phone added in my parent's bedroom after an incident in the middle of the night. My parents were both members of the town volunteer ambulance corps. Mom was on duty during the day when we were in school, and Dad at night once a week or so. Dispatch was done by telephone. One late night, the phone rang, and Dad did a face plant into the living room while running down the hall to get the single phone in the kitchen. On a rotating basis, the ambulance was parked in our driveway, and I remember riding in it after my Mom picked it up for my Dad in the afternoon after she picked us up from school. The photo below is of a privately owned same era ambulance at a car show.

1964 Cadillac Ambulance

 

Anyway, back to the phone. Dialing a rotary phone actually takes some skill and manual dexterity in order to dial accurately. The dial is a spring wound mechanism that operates a make/break set of contacts timed to operate at 10 pulses per second. So a dialed "4" is four open/close cycles of the contacts, an "8" is eight open/close cycles, etc. A "0" was the full 10 cycles. As an aside, a rotary phone would work on a touch-tone enabled line, but a touch-tone phone wouldn't work on a rotary only line. This was back when all anyone had was a landline, and a rotary only line was cheaper and most likely what grandma and grandpa had. I was a landline holdout, but finally got rid of it 3 or 4 years ago. I had the ringers turned off and no answering machine or voicemail, and only used it for calling 911 or for pizza.

I know this will sound dumb to have to explain, but bear with me. To dial a number; you place your dominant index finger in the hole next to the desired digit, spin the dial clockwise all the way to the metal finger stop, and pull your finger straight out and all the way out of the hole allowing the dial to rotate counter-clockwise unimpeded. Repeat the process until the entire phone number is dialed. Not going all the way to the finger stop or allowing your "finger to linger" in the hole on the dial will result in misdialed or wrong numbers. Prior to the country running out of phone numbers in the early 1990's, you did not have to dial the area code for numbers that were local or in the same area code. Farther back than that, 5 digit dialing was allowed within the same exchange office. I remember calling my neighbor up the road about him taking me fishing and just dialing 5-2812, dropping the leading "87". All that convenience went away when Kommiecticut went to statewide 911 and the central offices all got upgraded to digital. Prior to the 911 system, every police/fire/ambulance service had an individual local number listed in the blue pages of the yearly phone book. Most people had the numbers for their emergency services on a hand written note on the refrigerator or near the phone. Some local fire departments would do a printed refrigerator magnet with the numbers on it for their area as a freebie or fundraiser.

I am going to pay closer attention to what people say. Old farts like me will still say "dial the number" when referring to making a phone call, and I believe the younger crowd just says "make a call."