Grandkids React to Cars, Phones, and Life Before Modern Conveniences

[RRR]

The other day our daughter, 45, informs us that her daughter, 13, thought that when Wife grew up it was still horse and buggies for transport.

DW then dug up a picture of 1960 Buick, which was the same color of one that her parents owed. And said she could recall more than once her dad driving 120 MPH on the freeway.

Then DD chimed in with "No Seatbelts." GD couldn't fathom that.

Next week we will have a chat about cell phones.

 

[Brad Buchanan]

The other day our daughter, 45, informs us that her daughter, 13, thought that when Wife grew up it was still horse and buggies for transport.

DW then dug up a picture of 1960 Buick, which was the same color of one that her parents owed. And said she could recall more than once her dad driving 120 MPH on the freeway.

Then DD chimed in with "No Seatbelts." GD couldn't fathom that.

Next week we will have a chat about cell phones.

I hate to say it but the house I grew up in located in rural Minnesota had a phone that you cranked and then waited for the operator to connect your call.

One 'added benefit' was that it was a party line so you could listen in on the neighbors phone calls.

 

[Isaac-1]

Earlier this week I went on a day trip with my 87 year old mother to the town where she grew up (about 130 miles from here), along the way we talked about family history, she asked me if I remembered getting into a car accident when I was a kid along the route where someone rear ended us at a yield sign in her 1975 Chrysler Cardoba etc. We drove by the old homestead where she grew up, and the remains of the old farm house where she lived the first 7 years of her life which didn't have electricity, running water, and didn't even have glass windows, just wooden shutters.

Such conversations really does remind me how closely we are related to history that seems so long ago, for example my mother's maternal grandmother was born during the civil war and died at the age of 96 when my mother was in college.

 

[TheBar]

We also had a party line which was all that was available in that small town. My parents always complained about a few "old biddies" that always hogged the party line. It wasn't just 2 people, more like 6+ women in a group call spreading all the gossip. My dad had to get rude a few times so he could make an important call.

In the days before TV the phone was their main source of entertainment. A few years later when everyone got TV sets the party line was empty except for a few minutes right after each soap opera while the commercials were on. Isn't it odd the younger generation has gone full circle? The phone is #1 again and they don't watch TV. I guess nothing is better than good gossip.

Our phone had no crank nor dial. There was only one operator at a time. So sometimes you had to toggle the handset switch to make the light flash on the switchboard to get her attention.

 

[Isaac-1]

My ex-mother in law who lived in rural Missouri was still on a party line and had no other phone option until the late 1990's

 

[NY_Dutch]

As a kid, I spent my summers on my grandmother's farm helping out. The little town nearby had a manual phone switchboard that used batteries for power. The board was shut down at midnight to charge the batteries. If there was an emergency call from outside, the call went to the sheriff's office in the next town over, and they would send a deputy to wake up the operator and have her switch on the board in her living room.

 

[Domo]

In the early 1950's our air conditioning consisted of planting a tree outside and waiting for it to grow tall enough to shade part of the house...

 

[weighit]

When I was getting my 91 year old mother to leave her home in 2016 we discovered since 1967 she had been paying the phone company $3.79 for the phone "lease" and none of us kids had any clue. Plus when we called the phone company to ask what they wanted to do with this pink rotary dial phone, they said they wanted it back! My mom said it was always just part of the bill, so she paid it...

 

[EdJunior]

When we first moved out to "the farm" in 1976, our house (my Grandma's old house before my Grandpa died) had a skylight view (a bit hole in the cieling). We used Coleman lanterns and a Coleman stove to cook on. We had to draw water from the well in a bucket. We had no running water. We lived like that for a good 6 months before my stepdad (not a good person) finally got things fixed enough to get electricity run to the house. We eventually got a pump and got running water in the house. We never had air conditioning, just a couple of swamp coolers strategically placed to circulate air through the house. Heat was from a butane tank and old ceramic heaters. This was a pretty rough time for us (my brothers and sister). I joined the Air Force in 1980 to get away from it, and others got away as soon as they could. Stepdad finally just drove off one day with the TV, his favorite chair, and a few other things he could load up in his truck, and that was the last we ever saw from him. Oh, we had a party line out there too for the little I remember having a phone. Very interesting times.

 

[RayIN]

Someone once said something about the good-ole days before TV. I replied, Listen! I lived those days, and now are the good-old days.

 

[8Muddypaws]

The little town nearby had a manual phone switchboard that used batteries for power.

Right out of high school I went to work at Western Electric. I worked in the building that housed one of the oldest exchanges in California. It ran 100% on batteries. There were huge 3-phase AC motors in the basement that drove huge 90V DC generators that kept the batteries charged.

We were installing/building a computerized phone switching system (ESS?) to replace everything in the building. I spent my time being on the dumb end of a wire wrap tool. It was brain numbingly boring. I left after 6 months.

 

[Larry N.]

I spent my time being on the dumb end of a wire wrap tool. It was brain numbingly boring.

When I hired on at AT&T I started with mostly running jumpers, usually a soldered connection for wire strings of 2 to 5 wires each, often running 100+ feet on a jumper frame. When getting more into the computerized operations wire wrapping was a lot more common. With AT&T Long Lines it was mostly long distance stuff, though we interfaced a lot with the "Associated Companies" and with WECO folks.

After a few months I got more into other tasks (mostly maintenance stuff), such as cleaning relay contacts, cleaning and lubricating small motors, then into troubleshooting. After about 3 months I went to a basic electronics course, then a more advanced electronics school (including 2nd class radio license) after another 6 months (though I'd already had it in the Air Force). Later there were other company training schools (one was 13 weeks long), as well- most equipment was unique to the Bell System, or at least to the telephone business.

It seems we had WECO installers in the central offices just about all the time, and I don't know the specific paths those guys took in career and training, but many were very sharp on the equipment, and I know that they, too, had company schools for the various tasks they did.

After 33 years in AT&T I'd been into the later analog computers (analog switching machines, relays and such), then into the early digital computers (DEC PDPs, for example), even into computerized equipment added to the old electro-mechanical machines, then later still into tech support for the growing number of computers (excuse me, "Stored Program Control" machines - we couldn't call them computers) throughout the network.

Interesting stuff, as the years went by.

 

[Gary RV_Wizard]

We had a wall phone with no dial - we just lifted the receiver and waited for an operator to say "Number, please?". We lived on the outskirts of a small city and our neighborhood only had 4 or 6 person party lines available, but my Mom worked for NY Telephone at the time and pulled strings to get us a "party line" with no other parties. We kept that until around 1962 when the city finally got dial service and an actual private line. One of our neighbors managed the local power company, so we always had top-notch electrical service too.

 

[Arch Hoagland]

Dick Tracy had it figured out way ahead of his time. Who'd a thought that would come true.

 

[Tulecreeper]

I was born in San Diego in 1958, and lived there until right before my 10th birthday. My mom and dad both worked, so after school and in the summer I just had to check in with the lady across the street and I was on my own until my parents came home. We didn't have a party line, but I knew what it was. One time in the mid-60s there was a storm that moved through with a lot of wind and rain for about 20 minutes, then it was gone. Right after that, I went to make a phone call to a friend and when I picked up the receiver there were two women talking to each other.

I hung up and waited about 15 minutes, and when I tried again they were still talking. One of them said, "I think someone is listening to us." I said, "I'm not listening. I'm trying to make a phone call and you have the line tied up."

One said, "I'll call you back, Ethel," and they hung up. That never happened again. Something to do with the storm.