The "Calling Through The Ages" Story

It was an ordinary day.  And .... my cell phone is ringing!  Really loud!!  For you see, when I am running the printing press at the high school where I used to teach and still do their in-house printing, I have to set the volume on the phone to the highest level on the phone in order to hear it above the noise of the press.  But, most times after leaving the school, I forget to return the volume to a normal level and when it rings in a quiet location, it startles just about everyone including myself.  I still use a flip-top phone while most of the world is using smartphones, but I don’t choose to switch since I don’t see a need to switch.  My wife also has a flip-top and rarely uses it.  Guess this goes back to when Carol and I used rotary phones when most people were using the push-button phones.  One day, back in the early 1980’s our youngest son, Tad, had a friend over to the house to play and the friend asked to use the phone in our kitchen to call his parents. 

At the time we had a yellow rotary phone that hung high on the wall and had a 10 foot cord that could stretch to just about any room on our first floor if you pulled hard enough on it.  Ryan picked up the phone and looked at it for the longest time before asking Tad how you use it.  Seems that Ryan’s parents had the latest push button phones, as most people in that era had, and he didn’t know how to use our phone.  After a quick lesson from Tad, Ryan found the rotary dial pretty neat to use.  It was during this time in history that the Lancaster, Pennsylvania area was using exchange numbers to begin their phone numbers.  Our exchange was called “Express” and we used the first two letters of the word for our first two numbers in the phone number.  39 were our first two numbers with Lititz to our north using 62 for “Madison” and Millersville to our east using 87 or “Trinity.”  My wife's calling area to the south of Lancaster was "Butler" or 28.  These two numbers were followed by five more numerals to form our phone number.  My guess is that everyone else in the country used the same system of exchanges for many years.  Now, if you think the exchanges were a long time ago, you probably don’t remember when there were party lines in use.  My parents had a party line when I was a child in the 1950’s until they could afford to have a private line.  If you had a party line you were sharing it with other people.  At times I can remember picking up the phone to make a call and someone else was talking on it.  Pretty neat to listen to your neighbor’s conversations, but mom and dad would always tell me to hang up when hearing someone else talking on the phone line.  I can remember we had another party who used the line and if you were talking on the phone and they picked up the phone to make a call and heard us talking, they would bang the phone on the table until you were forced to hang up because of the noise.  Can you imagine party lines today?  May be pretty neat! 

And, when my parents were both confined to a nursing facility and I realized that they would never return to their home again, I had to begin the task of deciding what to do with everything they owned.  One of the neatest pieces in the house, and you have to realize this was in the early 2000’s, was their old rotary phone in their bedroom that sat in a cradle.  You picked the phone ear/mouth piece from the cradle in order to talk on the phone.  Too late now I realize, but this is one piece of history I wish I had saved instead of discarding.  So, what will our phones of the future look like?  And, how many generations of phones will I be behind in another 10 years?  Guess I’ll have to wait and see and hope you can turn the volume up to high on them.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.