5 Number Please?

Growing up on the farm, my first memory of a telephone was a 2 x 1 x 1 foot box mounted on the wall of our breakfast room. There was a three-inch-long bell-shaped receiver that sat on a U-shaped hook hanging on the left side of the box. By lifting the receiver, the U-shape hook would raise and open the communication line. The receiver was placed against the left ear, and one spoke into a cuplike piece mounted on the front of the box. To make a call, you lifted the receiver and waited until the operator answered, saying, “Number please?”

I stood on a stool to make my call.  The operator said, “Number, please?”

“I want to speak to Gramma”. Usually, my Gramma would answer, but if she did not, the operator would say,

“Your grandmother is not answering, you can try later”.

The operator knew everyone in town and who was connected to whom. She knew if anyone was home when they made a call.   Not long after my call, the phone rang, and my mother answered to hear the operator say.  “Does your son still want to talk with his grandmother?”

Mom looked at me, wondering how I had reached the phone.

“Yes, he’s here.”

I scooted the stool over by the phone and said, “Hi Gramma”.

The operator said, “Just a minute” and she connected my Gramma’s number. Sure enough, Gramma answered.

Wall telephone from 1930’s and 40s.Image permission from https://www.etsy.com/

This box telephone was mounted on our breakfast room wall. Standing on a stool, I was able to reach and unhook the earpiece hanging on the upper left of the instrument. When I unhooked it, the telephone line opened. I placed it on my left ear and spoke into the mouthpiece hanging off the center of the box. It was hard for me to reach my mouth up to the mouthpiece, but Gramma could hear me if I spoke loud enough.

If she had time, the operator could listen in on conversations and occasionally interrupt with a suggestion to solve someone’s issue.  There was no privacy. If you wanted to know about the private life of any one in town, the operator could let you in on the latest gossip.

In addition to this, we were on a “party line” which was shared with several other neighbors. If we happened to pick up the receiver at the same time as one of them, we would be able to talk to each other.  When calls came in, we had to listen to how many rings occurred. Ours was one ring, the neighbor was two rings, three for another neighbor and so on.  It was easy to listen in on each other’s conversations.

Often it was an inconvenience when you wanted to use the phone and when you picked up, someone else on the party line was talking and we would have to wait. I remember my mother cutting into a neighbor’s long conversation saying, “Excuse me I have to speak to my husband urgently, it will only take a minute”. With no other prompting, Dad was suddenly on the phone. The operator, who had been listening in, also knew exactly where to locate of my dad.

A few years later, when we had the rotary dial with a party line, some married woman in our neighborhood was having an affair.  We used to occasionally listen in and get our chuckles until mom caught us.

There were no secrets in Berthoud, Colorado in the 1940’s and 1950’s!

I remember that our number was “Oh nahn Jay won”, (09J1) as my southern mother said it.

In the mid 1950’s, we got our own separate line and were upgraded to a rotary phone with a circular dial with numbers 0-9 finger holes for dialing.  That’s why we still use the word “dial” when calling on the telephone.