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.
You invented the prank call!
