Pickles by Brian Crane for February 09, 2019

“And we walked 20 miles to school each day, uphill both ways, through 10 feet of snow!!!!”

Was going to suggest a cape, but then I remembered Edna Mode’s advice from “The Incredibles”…

The wall-mounted telephone — from which you couldn’t text, surf the Web, or play games — also had a cord and actual, non-touchscreen buttons! (nice knowing you, Nelson’s granduncle Leon)

Reminds me of Dana Carvey’s Grumpy Old Man character from Saturday Night Live.

All you could do is interact with other humans and keep up a conversation.

Older old people will remember a time before answering machines. There were a lot fewer spam calls then and the person on the other end of the line was human.

We had a black phone on the wall only once. The others were still black but they sat on a table.

and it was a Party line !

And it had a rotary dial!

So, essentially, this new superhero is about Earl — and half the readers of this strip.

It didn’t have a dial at all.

Milk ,Bread , and Eggs were delivered to your door …..

Actually (and surprisingly), I like it!

Earl is also Captain Blunderman.

…but we never lost that phone.

Too much like the other one, “Pluggers”

Leon i.e. Brian, you still got it!

The phone did not have to be replaced every 2 years and almost never broke no matter how many times it was dropped.

This is exciting! “Back in my day we didn’t have toilet paper, we had the Sears catalog!”

We had two phones when I was growing up. If I was really stealthy, I could use one to eaves drop on my big brother when he was talking to one of his girlfriends.

When I was a kid, we had one of the first “portable” phones. Our old black bakelite, rotary dial phone had an extremely long, cloth-wrapped cord attached, that allowed my mother to talk on the phone in any room, upstairs or down, in our little Cape Cod house – even in the basement.

We had a ‘telephone stand’ in the dining room where the phone usually resided and the cord was hung like a lasso. The stand sported a seat (or my mother’s “throne”, as we used to call it) and a little table that the phone rested on. Very stylish and practical in the late 1940s !

Oh, dear. Captain Underpants?? Hasn’t that been done already as a book series? Poor Earl. At least he’ll b famous!

And you had to try to get the phone to a closet to have a private conversation

My Grandparents lived in a home built in the 1920’s . It had a built-in nook for the new-fangled telephones. It was conveniently located in the Hallway between bedrooms and main living area. It was considered very modern for the day,

At least in the old days, we learned the art of verbal conversation. I don’t understand why kids would rather text. It’s so much simpler just to talk. If not a convenient time for the “callee”, there’s the option of a voice message.

All through our teen years the phone was attached to the kitchen wall. How were we supposed to talk to our girlfriends?

The black wall mounted or desk phones were property of the phone company. You never had to go shopping for a phone. The phones did not require batteries and never had to be charged. School classes and church services were never interrupted by ringing phones. And we didn’t spend hours trying to select a ringtone. Text messages were telegrams and very few were sent. Life was much simpler back then.

I love it…

Googling Pickles and Brian Crane, I discovered that Earl and Opal are inspired by his in-laws! He was inspired by how devoted to each other they were while bickering constantly. He saw something universal that people would recognize and thus the comic was born. So these last few strips are autobiographical.

I love it, too! ☺☺☺

Oooh, rotary dial – or talk to an operator on a party line. The B should be on his BACK.

How long before his sidekick Sergeant “When I Was A Boy” is introduced?

And the wall phone had a 20’ cord. My father was forever fixing it so it hung correctly!

Oh, have some fun with your kids and grandkids. Play the game of “When we only had one ____________ in the house.” One telephone, one TV, one family car, are the obvious ones, of course. But if you’re over 60, how many things did you live without that you didn’t know you could live without?

Ours wasn’t mounted, it just sat there.

My super-hero days lie ahead of me

No, it didn’t have any buttons, it had a crank! But it was on the wall.

And it was a ‘party line’, with seven other users!

Back in the day there were fewer warning labels, that kept the gene pool a little cleaner.

I would like to see a real Captain “Back In My Day” strip.