Nancy Classics by Ernie Bushmiller for June 17, 2022

Fritzi is always stunned by Nancy.

I’d rather keep a Grecian vase or a Neo-Classical sculpture in a niche like that.

In the next panel, we see Nancy climbing into a bookcase to do some reading.

It’s difficult to imagine we once had pieces of furniture, or even architectural features, devoted to telephones.

Isn’t that why you bring a chair or something that will make you comfortable on those long calls?

I love niches…only not to sit in…dat silly Nancy!

We had a recessed spot like that in the hall for the phone in our 1940’s built house.My grandfather had a small desk-chair unit with a light that came on when you sat down in the chair for his phone.

Grandparents had one too by their kitchen table, house was built in the late 1920’s

Nancy can’t resist a hole in the wall

My house has a niche like that, and it has a foldout shelf holder for your telephone book.All I need is a candlestick phone to put in it.

…

Well then drop a few pounds chunko.

We had an entire walk-in closet, with a small table, and a magazine rack, located under the stairs. The phone itself was a Western Electric 202 (from the new builds produced after the war, when AT&T realized that they had enough 202 spare parts for a hundred years), so the phone itself was tiny, with the bell and much of the circuitry in a separate black box mounted above the wainscotting.

Growing up some neighbors down the road had a private phone line and their phone was in a niche. Our phone hung on the wall. and some others were on a party line. Each member of the party line had a unique cadence of rings. It was fairly common for others on the party line to eavesdrop on your conversation.