But things had not yet changed that much in rural America, such as where we lived in that small rural valley in northern California. The switchboard operator literally slept in the room with the switchboard, so people knew not to bother her at night unless it was an emergency. To make a call the person would turn the crank on the side of his phone to make it ring at the switchboard, and the operator would then ask what number the person wanted. Then she would put the plugs into the proper socket to make the connection.

It turned out to be a built-in answering service for my dad’s medical practice, since she handled all the calls that came to and from him. She knew where he was at any time, and today would probably have been called a dispatcher. This was very handy since he saw many more patients at their homes than he did in his office. In fact, he delivered most babies on their family’s kitchen table. I have heard some of those moms tell colorful stories about that even today.

Most of the phones were on party lines, as few as 2 or as many as a dozen or more shared a single line. These lines stretched for many miles through the ranchlands along the 3 roads that traversed the length of the valley. Each ranch house thus shared phone access with all their neighbors. The ringer on every phone on that line would ring whenever anyone got a call, so different ring patterns were assigned to each phone. This consisted of a series of rings similar to Morse code, long and short rings in a specific sequence, so that the right person would know to answer it.

In order to make a call, the only way to see if the line was open was to lift the receiver and listen. If someone was talking you would have to wait til the line was clear before making your call. But people could also pick up the phone and listen to conversations any time they felt like it, and that is what people mean when they refer to a “party line”. Everybody knew everybody else’s business. Most people were courteous and didn’t make a practice of snooping, but there were those few who just couldn’t resist. In fact, they could get devices to connect to the line that only had a speaker, no microphone, in order to listen surreptitiously. It was not unlike our life In the 80’s when our off-grid community used CB’s, which we considered “party lines” at the time.

We began this excursion into my cranial archives as a day trip, but the sun is setting now and there is still more of the 50’s left to peruse. So I have taken a room at Tillie’s boarding house on Main Street. It is in a large brick building above the general store and looks out across the street to Corrigan’s Bar, which is built entirely of river rocks with glass blocks for windows. But since I am only 9 years old I am more interested in the movie theater next door, currently showing one of my favorites, “When Worlds Collide”. So I will eat dinner here at the rooming house and then go to the show. We will finish our look at phones of old tomorrow. Sweet dreams, see you in the morning.