Gray Matters by Stuart Carlson and Jerry Resler for July 17, 2015

Leave him out of the will.

I too remember that…..and our phone number was given out as “Normandy” 9- and then four numbers. We only had to use 5 numbers to call someone local…or just pick up the phone to see if they were on the party-line.

I just realized some may not understand the “Normandy” from above. The first two letters, N & O refers to the corresponding numbers 6 & 6 on the phone dial.

And people wanted to get private lines so the other folks on their circuit wouldn’t eavesdrop and know their business. Now, the go online and blast it out there for the world to see.

I still have a Bakelite rotary phone…

:-p

Whoa!

I remember when part of the AT&T display at Disneyland was a rotary phone next to a touch-tone phone. It was an interactive display where you would dial a 7 digit phone number on each one to show how much time the touch-tone phone would save. Not too long after that, they were available to phone customers.

I still have an old rotary dial phone, in use. It is great fun seeing my kids friends try to figure out how to use it.

Yes, but does the kid remember the Princess Phone?

I remember using a crank wall telephone on a party line.

Dad must have worked for AT&T Bell Labs, because those 16-button phones never went out to customers. (The extra buttons, running down the right side, were for back up, rewind, fast forward, etc., on telephone-dictation equipment, but they decided that just the two extra * and # buttons, together with combinations like *1, #0, etc., were just as good.)

We had a party line phone when I was growing up in Richfield, Minnesota. Pretty much everyone, except the elite, had this type of service in the 50’s and early 60’s. Phones back then were used for quick, brief communications. If you had a lot to discuss, you wrote a letter; usually in longhand…