Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for September 10, 2016

Is she calling England to get permission?

And that thing in the last panel is a phone. Honest. Yes, I know.

I was just reading an article on how the opposition to contraception and abortion on the part of the Radical Religious Right and Catholic Church has turned the relatively benign Zika virus (which doesn’t even cause noticeable symptoms in 4 out of 5 adults) into a full-blown health crisis, because the only serious risk it presents is to developing feti, but the dogmatic proliferaters* won’t let women do what they need to do to avoid a potential lifetime of effort, expense, and heartache having to care for a microcephalic child.––––––*the fully spelled-out real meaning of “prolifers”

What the heck ever happened to Sal?

Just gonna say, that and the landline really dates this comic.

I remember once sitting down in front of a manual typewriter and out of ingrained habit, spent a couple seconds looking for the on switch because I didn’t hear it humming.

O.K. I’m old, I’ll admit it ! I grew up before Zip Codes and Area codes and push button phones.

As a kid in Connecticut, my father insisted on a private number, so we were one of the few families not on a “party line”. The ‘extension’ phone was the extra long cord on our old black, bakelite, rotary dial phone that enabled my mom to take it throughout the house.

When I lived in New York City the first 2 digits of your phone number were letters ie. mine was CHelsea 6-5947.

When I first moved to Sedona, Arizona, we only used the last four numbers to call locally.

I learned to type on an old Royal typewriter that had a couple of sticky keys, I was thrilled when I got a portable Olivetti as a Christmas present when I was 15 !

And in panels one, two and three, those things in the background are books. I know, I once read them.

Need an extra copy? Get the carbon paper.

Carbon paper? Luxury. We used to have to wipe soot from the fire rocks on the back of another sheet. And you couldn’t hold the copy vertically or half the letters would slide off.

11921 — the number you dialed to reach the person on your party line.

Our first phone number was 866J!

I remember when the television man would come and fill up the TV once a week.

We had old fashioned standing phones in our front hall. At least on of them worked.And for years the island we visited used four digits, since there were four towns and the operator knew who was who. There was massive confusion when seven numbers arrived…

It’s good that she not calling a catholic priest or any Italian mother