Close to Home by John McPherson for November 18, 2012

Kids listening to grandpa? Not likely.

our phone was on a table

You mean 2015, right?

When Bell ran everything, everybody got one phone, unless you paid additional extension charges. If you were clever enough to score another phone and hook it up, they’d know about it.

I am only 47 but when I was growing up my phone rang 1 long and 2 short. Know what I mean?

we still had the old Bell Generator phones

Phone? What is Phone??

Odd, we got 2 extensions for our first phone….

And up until the mid nineties, my parents still had the black rotary phone.

Oh God I’m getting old. I could be that old codger at the ripe old age of 89. I can remember having just 1 phone for the whole house but no party line. I worked for 30 years with the phone company but my job just became more obsolete. What work is left is getting outsourced to the Phillipines.

100 years ago (1912) hardly anyone had phones in their house. Today hardly anyone has phones in their house.

Let’s not forget (it’s implied in some of the comments but not stated outright) that the phone company actually owned the phone in your home. I was too young to pay the bills at the time, but I believe that you actually had to pay a monthly fee for the phone itself. When we were eventually allowed to purchase our own phone from a third party, it was a big deal and saved us a decent chunk of change each month.

Hubby and I (early 40s) live with my mom, she won’t get rid of the land-line phones, yet is always on her cell!

Kind of missed the analogy, the one phone was fifty yrs from today, 11/2012. We had phones but they were “party lines” sharing with neighbors. Kids will listen to GP’s if they are brought up to do so.

It was a big deal when my brother and I got own own line with two phones hooked up in our rooms. Of course I never got to use it—he was on the phone for hours flirting!

I’m a teacher and I try to tell the kids just how good they have it, with all the resources at their fingertips. The best I could do was to try to kick my bro off the phone so I could call a friend in hopes that they were able to figure out the math problem. Now, take a picture, post it on Facebook and get instant help! Watch a video on Khan Academy, or….well, so many others.

Unfortunately few kids use the resources. They get stuck and they stop and don’t turn anything in. Sigh.

“and, this one time, at band camp….”

I am so old, I can remember 5-digit phone numbers, and our church had a candlestick phone (but with a rotary dial, “operator” had gone strictly long distance). I had relatives on a party line back then.

The party line was a country phone system.

OMG….as teen shared partyline with a heavy breather