Phone Lines: Tweedle Tweedle Little Phone

21 June, 2014

Tampa, FL

Millennium people will never know most of the joys and annoyances we Children of the Fifties grew up with. 

Take, for example, the telephone. 

PHOTO COURTESY RENEE GALLAGHER

In the Fifties and Sixties, and well into the Seventies, telephones were usually black, heavy, clunky devices, connected to the wall by a cord. You couldn't move around too much while on them - only just as far as they'd let you. 

Until the late Sixties (depending on where you lived) phones had rotary dials instead of push buttons to call another number.

left: STANDARD PHONE, SIMILAR TO THAT USED BY MY GRANDPARENTS. THE PHONE NUMBER WAS WRITTEN IN A PAPER INSERT IN THE CENTER OF THE DIAL - JUSTIN CASE YOU DIDN'T KNOW YOUR OWN TELEPHONE NUMBER! (I KNEW MY NUMBER, BUT EVERY TIME I CALLED IT, IT WAS BUSY, SO I QUIT TRYING!) BACK THEN, THERE WERE EXCHANGES, KNOWN FOR THE FIRST TWO DIGITS OF THE NUMBER. NAMES WERE GIVEN TO THOSE EXCHANGES. THE WHITEHALL EXCHANGE BEGAN WITH 94, SO THEIR NUMBER WAS WHITEHALL 4-3428.

If you dialed "0", a voice quickly came on the line, speaking in a nasal monotone, and saying: "Op'rayda!" (Operator.)

Folk-rock singer Jim Croce sang about his operator experience in his song "Operator": "Operator, well could you help me place this call...?"

When you picked up the receiver, there was a steady tone, called a dial tone, that usually sounded a single note (most commonly Middle C).

When someone called, the phone actually rang, meaning there were two bells inside the apparatus that went "dingalingaling!" In some countries, you actually "ring" somebody, instead of calling them.

As a kid, I remember dialing 1191 and hanging up - then in a few seconds the phone would ring! If you dialed 1186, the ring would be different. 

Up to the early Sixties, there were such things as Party-Lines! Two or sometimes THREE subscribers would share a single line. Our party-line was old Mrs. Brooks who lived around the corner. My grandfather bellyached every time he'd pick up the phone and hear her gossiping. " That woman was vaccinated with a phonograph needle!" he'd say. Guess that loses something in the translation in the new century.

If you were to pick up the instrument and accidentally bump it, the bell would issue forth a quiet "ding!" Phones were semi-portable. This means that one could carry it from place to place - but first the phone would have to be disconnected from the wall by pulling the plug from a wall jack. In earlier days, this was not possible, as the phone wires were actually connected into a board inside the wall outlet. 

In the Eighties, phones got smaller and no longer resembled the instruments we remember, and the bells in our phones began to disappear, to be replaced with tweetings and beepings of non-analog electronic telephones. 

My first experience with such a new-fangled device was in 1982. I was making a sales call on a major oil company in Lafayette, La. With me was the head of our Customer Service Department from Houston. 

Our high-powered meeting with this corporate exec had just begun when he was suddenly called away from his desk on a matter of great urgency. He apologized profusely as he left us.

We waited patiently, chit-chatting the minutes away, when our conversation was interrupted by the strangest noise either of us had ever heard. It was a kind of "Tweedle-tweedle!" bird warble.

We furrowed our brows, and looked at each other as if to say "what the …?" It continued several times more, and we could not figure out what it was or where this odd noise was coming from. 

We got up from our seats and began looking high and low to see if we could determine the source of this twittering, and it occurred to me that this might just be a setup for a popular hidden videocam comedy TV program called "Candid Camera."

The exec returned to find the two of us deeply engrossed in searching his desktop. 

"Can I help you find anything?" he asked, with a rather strange look on his face. 

(I can't IMAGINE what he thought we were doing!)

"YES!" we both answered in unison.

"There's this bird sound coming from something on top of your desk." I explained. "We don't know what it is."

"Oh," he said - a big smile lit up his face. "You mean my PHONE!"

"Your phone…" I said, inferring that I wasn't buying that explanation.

As if on cue, the tweedling began anew, and he picked up a small device that looked like no phone we ever saw. 

"The company just installed this new system," he informed us after his conversation ended. 

"It's cutting-edge technology." I guess it was cutting edge - if you're a BIRD!!!

Yes, times they were a-changing, and this change was comical indeed. - at least to us. 

On the way to our next appointment, I whistled a high-pitched warble, closely imitating that of the Louisiana Warbler we heard on our last call. 

"That was a great imitation of his phone!" she said, and we had a good laugh. 

Many years have passed since that sales call, and I have heard just about every noise or song imaginable on cellphone ringtones. It takes a lot nowadays to make me take notice. 

However, what I haven't heard in a very long while is a real, honest-to-goodness telephone ring - with BELLS!  In a way, I guess you could say that I miss it a bit.

"Don't take Ma Bell away from me....
I've gotten used to monopoly...."