Who's ever used a hand-cranked phone on a party line?

[struggle4progress]

Yeah, I realize some DUers may not even remember too much about phones with dials and that for them phone numbers like XAnadu-5-4321 may be retro enough ...

But I mean the old wooden box with a side crank that you crank to notify the operator to place your call, with the same phone line serving several customers ...

No, I'm not Methuselah: they still used an old hand-cranker on a ranch I worked on about thirty years ago ...

[bertha katzenengel]

1. I have.

Of course, it was at Disneyland.

But I vaguely remember when our phone number began with KL for Klondike.

[struggle4progress]

2. I regularly made long-distance calls on the thing.

It was lots easier to call from there than to there: to call in, it helped if ya knew some routing numbers, cuz the big city operators often didn't believe ya if ya explained it was a party line in the middle of nowhere ...

How was the long-distance service at Disneyland? :P

[bertha katzenengel]

26. fun listening in on the gossipy women circa 1904 - party line, don'tcha

know ;)

[grannylib]

3. Not the wooden ones, but the old black Bakelite ones with no numbers

just a crank in the middle to ring the operator, and yes, party-line...
Man, that brings me back a ways!

[struggle4progress]

5. I've never had my grubby paws on a Bakelite phone.

:(

[Kali]

4. never used it, but I am on a ranch and I have the old one that was here

and we were still on a party line until 2000! That is when we first tried to take computer on line and could not get modem to work...finally a good tech person at the phone company figured it out. the party line wasn't "occupied" by anybody else but apparently the switch still existed?

I remember there were 3 or 4 different rings when I was a kid - we were one long one.

Where did you work?

[struggle4progress]

6. Small cattle ranch in the Great Basin.

If I recall correctly, our ring was three short rings, usually repeated after short pauses: "Brng! Brng! Brng! ... Brng! Brng! Brng! ... Brng! Brng! Brng!"

[Suich]

7. We had one when I was a kid in Eugene.

I still have it...in the bookcase in my living room.

:hi:

[struggle4progress]

12. Lovely! The old one I remember had been rather nicely polished ..

.. by being touched by hand after hand for several generations ...

[jpak]

8. Hand cranked telephone exchanges lasted until 1983 (Bryant Pond, Maine)

http://www.privateline.com/mt_telephonehistory/iv_the_telephone_evolves/07_part_g/

There were a lot of folks that up there that would still use them if they had the option.

:)

[struggle4progress]

10. The "no need to fix it if it still works" Yankees?

[jpak]

11. Ayuh

:evilgrin:

[struggle4progress]

13. RFLOL!

[BrotherBuzz]

9. My buddy was on our party line

I could never call him directly because the line was always busy. The only way I could call him was to dial my own number then hang up. The phone started ringing at both locations, and I answered when bell stopped ringing, indicating someone had answered at his house. It sounds confusing, but that's what we had to to.

:shrug:

on edit: Oh, I was going to mention Grandmas telephone but got sidetracked with party lines. Grandma had a brabed wire party line telephone system when mom was a kid. They were thrifty and used the fence to cary the signal. It kinda worked until it rained. Lot's of funny stories because there were three people on the line with the same first name and that led to a lot of strange calls.

[struggle4progress]

15. Yeah, well ... uh ... now, wait just a minute ... huh?

There's something not too clear in this picture for me.

It makes sense that the line was busy if ya called his phone, of course, cuz ya was on the phone and it wuz the same line.

What I ain't seeing is how ya could get yer own phone to ring, since ya was on that line, too.

Did it work if ya dialed his number and then hanged up right smart, afore the switchin finished?

[BrotherBuzz]

17. It had to be my own number...

If I dialed his number and hung up, the connection would be severed and nothing would happen. Believe me, it was the only way I could call him.

[struggle4progress]

18. Amazin! And nifty neat-o cool, too!

[China_cat]

14. No hand cranked but I do remember

when phones had no dials. You picked up the handset and told the operator who you wanted to talk to. And they only abolished party lines where my stepfather lives about 10 years ago.

[struggle4progress]

21. Yeah, we didn't got all them fancy city-slicker improvements ..

.. where I wuz ...

I think our phone operator probably had another job (like, I dunno, being postmaster or mayor or maybe runnin the local house of ill-repute) and couldn't sit all day at the switchboard, cause grinding at the crank didn't always earn an immediate response ...

[Richard Steele]

16. No hand crank, but we had a party line until the mid-late 1970's.

Complete with the clichéd 'neigborhood gossip' who
eavesdropped on everyone else's calls.

[struggle4progress]

19. Well, I for one am certainly glad that those old days when

some sanctimonious snoop monitored everybody's private communications are now just a mem-uh .... um .... something about this rings a bell ... :evilfrown:

Hey, dicksteele! Hope all's goin well! Missed y'all! :toast:

[CaliforniaPeggy]

20. My dear struggle4progresss........

I never had such a phone......

But I do remember the party lines!

And phone numbers with prefixes too......

My college dorm had a phone where you picked up the receiver to call down to the switchboard so they could get you a line out......

That was retro enough!

:hi:

[struggle4progress]

23. Did you have to settle up your long-distance bill at the front desk?

And did you have to leave your dorm door open if you were on the phone with one of your many beaus?

[CaliforniaPeggy]

25. ROFLMAO!

You know, I do not remember how the bill was handled!

Leave the door open? Many beaus? :rofl:

You must be kidding me!

I had only a few boyfriends in college, and they were without exception one at a time!

And when I was talking privately *ahem* I would take the phone into the closet which was right next to it.........:blush:

I remember sitting on the floor with the door closed!

Good times, good times!

[GoddessOfGuinness]

22. I had a neighbor who did

when I was a little girl.

We had a party line, but a standard dial phone from the 1940s.

[struggle4progress]

24. Gotta say I love the telly photo in your sigline.

:D

[Chan790]

27. My grandparents had one

until I was 11 (I'm 26 now) because they wouldn't let the phone company switch it over to a standard pulse phoneline.

[ForrestGump]

28. Lived out in the boonies at an outdoor pursuits center and had the wooden

hand-cranked phone with everyone's phone number rendered in morse code...it was a party line, too. My parents worked there for six of my most formative years. The morse code was particularly appropriate, I guess, given the outdoors survival aspect of the place. :D

[OnionPatch]

29. No, never used one of those, but

when I was a kid, out in rural Ohio, we had party lines. One ring for us, two for the neighbors. The neighbors had a teenager who talked to his girlfriend constantly. We little kids had a blast listening in to their fights, etc. :evilgrin: I'm sure he hated us and rightfully so.

[RebelOne]

30. I remember my grandmother had one.