Those were the days

In the great world of inventions, perhaps one of the greatest was the telephone.  Living “in the boondocks” — actually about 3 1/2 miles out of Greybull — we didn’t have the convenience of a telephone until I was a sophomore in high school.  I think then it was Mountain States, but I don’t remember, decided they could extend a telephone line up the Greybull River and beyond.  However, it was not that everyone from here to there got a private line. Oh, no, we had a “party line” that in our case included seven families.

And if you haven’t ever had a “party line,” you haven’t lived.

The phone didn’t ring when any of the other six parties were talking. That was the problem.

Pick up the phone to make a call and hear your neighbor on the line was a common occurrence.

Now in my case, I always felt guilty and couldn’t hang up fast enough. Not so with others. Get a call and you would hear someone pick up and conveniently “forget” to hang up. Maybe you would hear two or three parties pick the phone up and do what we called “rubberneck” to see what gossip they could get to liven up their day.

I can honestly say I never, that’s right, never rubbernecked. I felt guilty just picking it up, putting it to my ear and hearing someone else talking.

And with seven parties sharing a line, sometimes if was hard to even get a chance to make an “important call” to a friend.

But, back in the ‘50s, knowing what was going on in your neighbor’s lives was a great pastime for some.

I had an aunt in South Dakota who put up with a party line for many years. She always bragged that she never got a wrong number. If the operator gave her a different number than she asked for, Aunt Henrietta said, “I just made small talk, like I had intended to call her.”

I, being much more timid, would just slam the phone back down.

Getting a private line a few years later, after I was out of school, was a great convenience, but I think those “rubberneckers,” thought life was dull and they were missing out on a lot of interesting and lively news they would never read about in the local paper.

Today, so many years later, land lines are almost a thing of the past.

I just wish they had telephone directories that included cell phone numbers.

And nowadays, no one knows what rubber necking is. But one good thing, people didn’t sit around, take the old dial phone off the hook and play games, look up information and check out Facebook for hours on end.