Party line

I don't know if we always had a telephone when I was little. We did some of the time because my father worked for the railroad, and they had to be able to reach him, and he had to be able to reach them.

The earliest telephone I remember was one of the old boxes that hung on the wall. It had a handle on the side that we cranked to get the operator. She would connect us to the party we wanted, unless she happened to know they had gone to town or some such place and would tell us so. Telephone numbers in our rural exchange were only three or four digits, and I don't think we actually referred to numbers but to the names of people we wanted the operator to connect us to.

We were on a party line with a number of other families, and if any of them were on the line, we had to wait until they were through before we could place or receive a call. If we wanted to be snoopy or catch up on the latest neighborhood gossip, we could quietly listen in, hopefully without the other parties knowing we were there. If our call were urgent enough, we could speak up and ask them to get off the line so we could place a call.

Each party on the line had a distinctive ring. We had to tell by the ring whether an incoming call was for us or one of the neighbors. A long and two short rings might be ours, while two longs might be the neighbors a quarter of a mile up the lane. And so on.

Occasionally, strangers would knock on our door during the night or early morning hours to see if we had a telephone they could use. Their cars were traveling too fast to negotiate the sharp curve right by our house, and they would invariably end up in the drain ditch just beyond.

Long-distance telephone calls were almost unthinkable. And they were never dialed directly. They had to be placed through an operator. They usually came when someone had died.

We got two such calls in the same week in early 1959. On February 2 my Aunt Stella called from Utah to say that Uncle Wayne, my dad's younger brother, had died from an operation he had had two weeks earlier. On February 4 my Uncle Bill called from Washington to say that Grandpa Batt, my mother's father, had died in his sleep in the mission field in Vermont. Both deaths were entirely unexpected and set in motion a 17-day family trip, first to northern Utah for Uncle Wayne's funeral and then to eastern Idaho for Grandpa's funeral.

Less than a month later, after we had attended those two funerals, our family moved from Oregon to Idaho. On our new farm south of Nampa we actually had a telephone with a rotary dial and a five-digit telephone number. But we were still on a party line.