The Old Time Telephone

The Old Time Telephone


It is a common joke nowadays that young people have no clue what a dial telephone looks like.  I can go back much, much further than that.

The farm near La Crescent and Hokah, Minnesota had a telephone.  This was only because the telephone company had gone to the trouble of sinking telephone pole after telephone pole all the way up Pfeffer Valley so that a telephone wire could be strung to each house that wanted a telephone.

There were no cell phones.  There were no wireless phones.  There were no dial phones.

Our telephone was like a shoe box screwed to the wall in the kitchen.  Protruding from it's front was a metal fork upon which the "receiver" hung.  The fork was part of a switch inside the box.  When the receiver was lifted from it, it raised up and closed the connection.  It was spring loaded.

On the right hand side was a crank.  If you lifted the receiver, which connected you to the "line", the wire hanging on all those poles, and turned the crank, it made a grinding sound because a little hammer vibrated between two small bells mounted inside the box.

Everyone's little box vibrated and rang, all the way up and down Pfeffer Valley when you did this.

If you spoke into the receiver anyone holding the receiver to their ear could hear you.  All the way up and down Pfeffer Valley.

Everyone had their own ring.  Ours was a long ring followed by two shorts.  If our box rang three short bursts, we knew it was for someone else and we knew who.  Each distinctive ring sequence was actually a phone number.  Ours was a long and two shorts.

The phone company had a switchboard somewhere, probably in La Crosse or Houston, Minnesota or someplace like that.  If someone outside your line wanted to call you, first of all they were going to have to pay.  By the minute!

If you wanted to call someone outside your line, you called the operator, which might have been three longs or something like that.  She would then make the call for you and it would cost you by the minute as well.

The funniest part was that when your phone jangled a long and two shorts, you picked up the receiver and put it to your ear and you would hear, "click, click, click, click, click!"  Everybody up and down the valley was picking up their receiver and listening in.

Some of the more advanced model phones had a microphone part on the box and you spoke into that and listened with the moveable piece which was about as big as a microphone that a singer uses.

Everything was connected by wires.  You didn't walk away from the box.

Now picture this:  Al Botcher has just brought home this twenty-eight year old hottie and her snotty nosed kid and the phone jangles a long and two shorts, which is his number.  All the little old ladies up and down the valley are just dying to have the latest information and pick up.  Sometimes someone would even acknowledge it!  They might join in the conversation.

Honest to God, this is what it was like.

Grandma Lill and Grandpa Lee got a phone and it was the same thing.  She had an advantage.  Her mother would call from Westby or her Sister Carrie would call from La Crosse and they would talk in Danish!  I can remember sitting in the kitchen and listening to her just rattling away in Danish.

My friends, Larry and Tommy Langen, a mile down the valley, and I developed our own plan. We could see one another's yard lights which were mounted atop one of the power poles in the driveway. and lit it so you could see out there.  I had not yet heard of Morse Code, something that I became very proficient in at a later date, but we messaged each other by flipping the switch on and off once for the letter A, twice for the letter B, and so forth.

It was extremely tasky to get even a short message through by this method but it was a lot of fun, until our parents put an end to it.  Not only were we wearing out the light switch and making a lot of aggravating noises, but the constant turning on and off of the light up on the pole is not good for it, as it turns out and someone has to come and climb the pole to replace the bulb.

You could have what they called a "private line", one that was dedicated solely to yourself, but it was costly and really only used by doctors or lawyers or anyone whose conversations had to be private, at least on their end.  I didn't know anyone who had a private line so the telephone could be quite an irritation because your phone jangled whenever anyone on the line made or received any calls, and secrets or sensitive information was rarely shared in a phone call because everyone was listening in.

Once in a while my mother would be talking to someone and she would get mad because she could hear other people breathing as they listened in to her conversation.  Occasionally, if she were in a bad mood, she would blurt out a reprimand, but nobody would own up to being the recipient.

This was one of the ways that everybody knew all about everyone else's business.  There was another way, but I will talk about him at a later time.