The Phone

DO YOU REMMBER THIS?

My earliest memory of a telephone was when I was five. We lived with my grandmother in DuBois. I remember just where the phone was…sitting on a stand right at the bottom of the stairway. It was the old, old fashioned upright one where you held the earpiece up to your ear on a cord.



Grandma had a party line. That meant that there was more than one family who used that phone line. When you picked up the receiver you might hear another person having a conversation. You would just politely hang up. There might have been one or two other families on that line. To distinguish the rings each family was assigned a certain number of rings. If it rang twice that meant the call was for us.
In our kitchen we had a black wall phone like this. As a teenager I spent many hours talking to my boyfriend on this phone. Wasn’t it amazing how we could just talk and talk?



I remember one particular Italian boy that I went steady with. I wore his ring on a chain around my neck. When he called at night he put on a thirty three and a third long playing record of Italian love songs and we listened to them together. How romantic!

In college there was a pay phone in the hall. Don was in the Navy then and he would call me every so often for a chat. I would be in my dorm room and hear the phone ring and say , “that’s Don”.  and it would be.

Do you have any telephone memories?