A Relic of a Phone

Possibly the world's oldest continuously operating phone.  62 years (so far) of reliable service.

My parents have the same phone on their kitchen wall that was installed when they built their house in 1957.  It is the same phone that was there when I was born in 1959.  Growing up, it was the only phone in our house until dad started working for the power company in the 70's.  Then he had another phone installed in my parents' bedroom so that he could take calls into work in the middle of the night when folk's power went out.

Both are rotary phones, which don't exist except as novelties anymore.  You can't navigate today's corporate phone jungles with them.  You can't "press 1 now."  You can dial 1 but that doesn't do anything anymore.  The receiver still works crystal clear, so you can "say 1 now" if asked to.  Otherwise you are stuck.

The old kitchen wall phone makes and receives what used to be called "ordinary" phone calls just fine.  You might have heard of that.  Where one person calls another person and talks to them.  Of course you can't leave the house, or even the room, while conversing; even with the extra-long phone cord they had installed for the phone about 30 years ago.  You can stand at the sink or sit at the kitchen table and talk.  That's it.

When I grew up we had a "party" line.  That was where our house and my aunt and uncle's house shared the same phone line, just different numbers.  One long ring was our house.  Two short rings was their house.  That way we knew when to pick up the call and when to ignore it.

In early adolescence, I did what almost every kid my age did with party lines back then.  I spied on the other line, in this case my aunt and uncle.  I learned that if you unscrewed and disconnected the speaking end of the phone's receiver it would totally mute it.  If you picked up the phone very carefully, it wouldn't "click" in the ear of someone using the line.  So, I could listen-in on my aunt as she talked to my grandmother about doing laundry or how her coconut custard pie turned out.  It was usually exciting stuff, being a young spy in the country.

I was once talking on this very phone when I got into "big trouble" as my dad scolded me at midnight once when I was senior in high school.  I was sitting on the floor in the dark talking low (I thought) to her and my curfew was 10PM.  He had gotten up to use the bathroom otherwise he never would have heard me giggling in the kitchen.  Big trouble was a grounding in 1977, a few years earlier, a bit younger, and it might have been a spanking.  But I wasn't into girls yet back then.  It sucked anyway and I argued with my dad about it.  Ah, youth!

How many calls have been made on this single rotary phone?  Well, not as many as you think because the phone was a rare and needed thing back then.  It wasn't the luxury of living in your phone that it is today.  There were calls everyday.  But not that many.  There were no telemarketers back then.  If you got a call it was from someone you knew or some civic official.  You might get 3-5 calls a day.  I always called home Sunday evenings when I was in college.  My parents answered on this phone.

If you pick up this phone today you really know you have a hold of something solid.  It is dead weight in your hand and has survived being dropped on the floor probably hundreds of times during its existence.  Unless the connections on the cord go bad you literally cannot tear this phone up.  It is almost indestructibly solid.  "They don't make 'em like they used to" never applied more to anything on the face of this earth.

The joy of a rotary dial reflects a much slower paced time.  There were no speed dials.  You put your finger in the one of the holes number 1 to 0 on the dial and you turned it clockwise to a certain point then you released it and let the dial rotate counterclockwise back to its original position.  You waited and then you did the same thing for the next number, and so on.

Originally you only had to dial four numbers to call someone.  Then they upped it to five.  Those were back in the days when my house had no street or road address number.  I simply lived on "Route Two."  Then progress caught up with us and we had to dial seven numbers to get someone.  

Everything outside of the county was long distance, which usually involved calling the operator, at that time.  You could pay extra for the single call on your bill or you could place a "collect call" and the party you called would pay for it on their bill.  When I was in college all my phone call's home were collect calls.  It was they way for a poor student to go.

I have a lot of funny family memories about this phone.  Once as my sister and I were eating our breakfast, getting ready for school, my dad decided to be a good Samaritan and call one of his work buddies who had recently undergone surgery.  I heard him proclaim into the phone: "Hey Butch, how's your hemorrhoids?!"  

There was a pause.  Then my dad said in a different tone.  "Oh, I'm sorry, I must have the wrong number."  I heard the solid bump of the receiver latching back down on the body of the phone.  The whole family exploded with laughter.

So, I'm a lucky guy.  Whenever I visit my parents I walk past the first phone they ever owned, still in operation, though rumor has it that the days of old-fashioned landlines are numbered.  It is one of the oldest personal relics in my life, two years older than myself.  And perhaps it is fitting that this wonderful old phone is still working and will continue to work until the phone line itself, rather than the phone, becomes obsolete.