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 in a U shaped hook on one side of the box. By lifting the receiver, the U shape hook would be released, opening the line for communications. Placing the receiver on your ear, you spoke into a cuplike piece mounted to 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.  “Number please” was the response.

“119” would be my answer. 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 any one 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 Gramma?”

Mom looked at me wondering how I reached the phone.

“Yes, he is here.”

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

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

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

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”.

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 and told us not to listen in on others’ conversations!

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

I remember that our number was “Oh nahn Jay won”, 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.