I was watching reruns on TV last night. I had recorded an episode of "I've Got a Secret" from the early 60's. I finally got around to watching it. Steve Allen was a guest and did a few telephone stunts. One of them was trying to get Bill Cullen to accept a long distance collect phone call. It made me think of how things have changed. When I was younger I remember when we always waited until after 10:00 PM to make long distance phone calls. if the phone rang after 10:00 it normally meant a relative was calling. I also remember when I would go out of town to visit family. My parents would tell to call collect person-to-person when I had arrived. They would usually say the person I was calling was not home and refuse the charges, but they knew I had arrived safely.
Nowadays, we don't think twice about picking up the phone and calling most anywhere. Here at the house we have unlimited long distance and even can call internationally on the cheap. Then there are the cell phones. Call anywhere, anytime, from anywhereand the long distance is included.
When I was younger we only had one phone. It was in the kitchen and I swear the phone cord was a mile long. I especially remember my sister talking on the phone and taking the phone, really the receiver, across the hall into her room. Before I went to junior high we moved. Our new house had a phone in the kitchen; and wow, phone jacks in the bedrooms. We got another phone and it was great. My brother and I could take the phone out of our parents room and take to our room and then talk. Wow! Those phones had long cords to. I guess the long cords made up for not many phones.
By the time I got married the phone business had been deregulated and you could buy phones instead of renting them from Ma Bell. When we lived in Irving the pharmacy at Kroger had a promotion that gave free phones with new prescriptions. That was really different. Now we were responsible for our own phones. If they broke, buy a new one. And we did. But these were corded phones. They were still stuck to the wall.
Hallelujah! Cordless phones! Finally, a phone that you could take anywhere and talk on it. As long as you were within range of your base set. They were great though. Freedom at last. You could have a phone in the kitchen and the bedroom and maybe the den and the garage. You could talk and talk and talk.
And then the cell phone. But that's a story for another day. Remind me to tell you sometime about Scott and the first cell phone he had.
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