When my parents first got a telephone, I called my grandparents by picking up the receiver and when the nice lady said "Number please", I told her 42.
Wow....you've beaten me. Remember how tough those phones were? I once knocked out my brother with the handset. The only thing to survive nuclear war would be cockroaches, Twinkies and rotary phones.
Rotary phone? That must be something those uppity city folk had. My parents first phone didn't have anything. You had to wait for the operator. And, initially we were on an 8-party line. I think calls to us were 4 rings. A short while later, we were upgraded to a 4-pary line. Big time! To call someone on your own party line, you had to tell the operator 8108 + 2 more numbers that I think were your 1 digit sequence number and the person you were callings' 1 digit seqence number. Then you would hang up and your phone would ring for however many rings their number was. When the phone quit ringing, it means they had answered. You then picked up the receiver and had your conversation. Whew! I don't know how I remember all that. It's been a while.
Did your parents have to first crank the phone?
I remember those odd rings and dialing sequences. I was 5 years old when my Greats would count incoming rings. When they dialed their neighbors, I thought they had forgotten what they wanted to discuss and just hung up the phone.
Yeah...we were uppity with our own phone number.
No, no cranking. You just picked up the phone and waited for the operator. The phone was a black desktop and it looked like a rotary phone, but it didn't have the rotary dial. We had our own phone number too that people not on our party line used when they called us. Funny, that phone number is the one thing I don't remember. But, that's not too surprising, because some people can't remember their own phone number now. It was probably 3 digits though. My grandparents must have gotten their phone pretty early since their number was 42. I remember it because I used to call them a lot. Because I was so young, I had a bit of trouble with it until I figured out how it worked. I kept telling the operator 42 when she asked me for the number and I couldn't understand why the phone never rang when I hung up. I did eventually figure out that I didn't have to hang up to call Granddad.
