between the living/sitting room and dining room. I still miss the rings of old time telephones and the sounds made when you dialed them (and yes, I know you can add the ring tone to your cell phone-but it isn't the same).

A wall phone was too modern for her. LOL

in a dedicated phone room under the stairs to the second floor.

I'm suddenly feeling pretty nostalgic. In a good way.

I still miss the rings of old time telephones and the sounds made when you dialed them

One ringa dinga, two ringa dinga dinga.

Do an image search for "vintage telephone alcoves." Found one that reminded me of my aunt's alcove in a high-rise in Chicago. The alcove was built-in and the black phone sat on a round table about 9" across, which fit right into the alcove. There was a comfy chair by the phone and oh how I loved to sit there and talk on the phone like a grown-up did. Felt so important!

The other thing I loved to do in that Chicago high rise was look out the window on the street below. The cars and people looked like toys.

Last edited Sat Jan 26, 2019, 12:49 PM - Edit history (1)

Here's my Mom's rotary-dial phone on a phone table with my own phone laying next to it.



I took the photo six years ago. Mom's gone now and I don't know what became of the phone.

It was the cheapest model. (We were cheap)

We kept it until 1995 or something like that..

We ditched it for a cordless. Until we got a cordless, there was no reason to get another one.

I found an antique one when I was living in a restored Victorian in Capitol Hill, Denver. This was before cell phones. It was darling. There was a little open space under the top where you kept your phone book. I miss old phones, too, and LOVED the dialing noise. Sigh.

when I got married I put one in the kitchen (my first wall phone with the long cord) once I had babies I even bought a special "thingy" that kept that long cord from twisting into a short cord. Remember having to say, "Wait a minute I need to untwist the phone." then standing on a chair and letting it spin? What a pain in the ass that was. God I am old! To think we are talking about this kind of thing. LOL!

and spinning to untwist. Pain in the ass, agreed!

I remember the first push button phone I saw. You might even say it was "space age."

I guess it will live on in some fashion.

until now when I saw it was a 4 minute video. I would have thought it was self explanatory but I see it is not. Wow. They were not even stupid, they just simply did not know and tried everything they knew about their phones now. Interesting and funny too.

Thanks for that. Makes me feel a little better about staring at my smart phone with a blank expression when I'm trying to figure out how my "ring tone" mysteriously changed on me.

and place it back down again. I guess they thought they were resetting or rebooting it.

Interesting way of showing that technological bafflement goes both ways. I'll bet those young men have had no end of frustration trying to show their elders how to use computers or smart phones.

...Sometimes when the directions are to push a button, I have to go upstairs to find my button phone. Just like on that wall..but not a wall phone, a button desk phone.. Yes, I have a "cell phone" that I carry around with me for "emergency" but what the hell, and you know what?..........It is "Amazing I'm still alive"
......(Yes the dial phone works..I can dial numbers if I want..usually I go upstairs to the push button phone, cause that is where my list of numbers is)..

....The dial phones at that time were all made in a factory in Cicero, Illinois not too far from where I live..Now all the phones are made outside the U.S.A. I might add this, the sound on the dial phone, (bought in the early 80s) and the "push button, (that was bought in the early 90s) is much louder and clearer than the sound on the cell phone. So the sound is a much higher quality than the tiny cell phone...Just wanted to add that for your information.....Yes, I will say it again...it still works..!!

....The dial phone in the kitchen is really an "extension phone" I rarely dial, I just pick it up when the phone rings to talk to somebody. Yes, the dial does work, and sometimes I do dial people. Have a good day!!!

Black with rotary dial.

Original with the house ('62)

(Still works)

They were built right here in the United States. And they were built to last..That is built to last a very long time. Mine is from 83. .. Yes it still works too. My phone that sits on a table. If you look at post 18, that is what my phone looks like, but it is tan............ALSO:

The sound that you get from the people that you call, is clearer than most modern phones. Not only clearer but louder so you can hear better, mainly because you have a earpiece (large round thing) which is designed to hear well.....

you first started to be able to buy phones and whoever used to make those indestructible phones had an ad comparing its own engineered-to-last phones with everybody else’s “second class phones”? Still today I pick up phones and think, “second class phones.” I frankly hate this crap we have today, and the fact that you can’t cradle it against your shoulder and have both hands free. The whole cordless thing is nice, but it doesn’t make up for cradling.

Had her only phone, a heavy black rotary-dial, on the kitchen counter. In rural York County Pennsylvania she had to get an operator to make a long-distance call in the 70s. The nearby town had a mom-and-pop phone company.

our phone was in the neighbor's house.

I had a girlfriend who lived out in the boonies in Arkansas and they had a party line. You had to wait to see if it was "your ring" before picking it up. You could also listen in on other parties conversations. There were no secrets in that county.

stopped offering it.

Grew up, of course, with one rotary, in the kitchen. You could talk to your boyfriend if you wanted, but not exactly private.

the state's department of revenue took a tentative step into higher tech by offering tax filing via telephone. I figured what-the-heck and gave it a try.

The call was answered by a recording that gave instructions on how to proceed, it went something like this: "If you have all your information prepared, please press 1. If you are calling from a rotary phone, please press 2."

I filed a paper return.


.

Reader's Digest. The "Life's Like That" section. Remember that?

It twisted around and around, so tight one couldn't uncoil it because it would start reverse coiling on itself. Ours got so bad, my mom called the telephone company and they happily came out and disconnected the hardwired telephone from the cord to help uncoil it. I kid you not!

How did we ever get here????

Before our kids were grown and moved away they'd befuddle their friends showing them the big black Model 500 Western Electric dial phone on my desk. These phones were built tough, literally tough enough to survive nuclear war.



I have a pink Trimline phone with a dial in my workshop.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Western_Electric_telephones

I'd bet that close to half of homes in the country had phones like the top photo in your post. Those things were very common, partly because, as you noted, they were so durable.

Nasty projectile!

The Dark Ages are what we're going through now.

upo seeing the phone, if this was 'some new technology phone?'

And when I was a kid and went to a friend's apartment (no houses when I was growing up, just lots and lots of apartments) and they had a wall phone, I thought they were doing pretty darn well. A wall phone. Wow. And double wow if anyone had a princess phone. All we had was a table top phone, green if memory serves.

And I'll bet we answered the phone with a normal Hello, not the Hello? we use today because if there's no caller id we don't trust who might be calling.

I hate the phone.

In 2005 we had a computer problem at work and had to get some checks in the mail. Our newest employee volunteered to help. She was a recent college graduate and had only learned on a computer. She didn't know how to feed the blank check into the typewriter, didn't know how to Return to the next line and couldn't press the keys hard enough for an IBM Selectric. We laughed because most of us old folks learned how to type on manual typewriters. Then we apologized and acknowledged how much technology had changed.

I later told her how my mother's first job in the late 1930's was delivering telegrams, not by walking but by riding her bicycle around the city, because few people had telephones to receive quick important messages. I think that really blew her mind.

P.S. a couple of years later I helped my dear Mother sent a text message. She heard my sister's cell phone ding across the room and was amazed that her message went up to a satellite and back down to earth is such a short time.

You could tell if the incoming call was for that phone, or for one of the other two on the line, by the ring sequence. To call out, you cranked it to get the operator, then said whatever number you wanted to call

If there are still operators employed, I'd bet there are very few of them.

Siri has run them out of jobs!

from a "land line"?

I was thinking cellphone even though you wrote cordless.

Oh well, good night, sweet operator!

My brother and I gave it a wide berth because you didn't dial a number like we did at home - with hers, if you picked up the receiver, you got a live operator!

http://privateline.com/?page_id=321

....A few minutes ago, today, just now, I dialed a friend and had a short conversation about getting together later in the day..

..............This did not happen in the so called, "dark ages".........
............This did not happen 50 years ago...........................
..............This happened about 20 minutes ago. and.....guess what??
..................................the dial worked...and the call worked...and I talked to my friend....

....................and yes, when I pick up my ..."old"...phones....I do not have caller ID..and most times
....................I do not know who is/ or was calling.......today...................................................

..ONE MORE ISOLATED FACT ABOUT GETTING UP TO ANSWER THE PHONE AND NOT KNOW WHO IS CALLING...
..........You will not believe this...but here goes...................I have estimated that in the last, say 10 years...
.........I have gotten up from the computer or wherever to answer the phone and walk some steps without knowing who is calling about ...14,000 times.......If I had the phone right next to the computer..I wouldn't have'got up at all.................??????????
.........................................................I don't believe it either.....

town - in Alabama I think. Anyway, his phone number was #5. You called the town operator, told her the # or party you wanted to reach, and she connected you.

Lovely, vintage Avocado.

..yep the kids are fine... Uh huh... uh huh... that's CE-401. Thank you.

Check this out. 1954.

I saw my first touch tone phone at the 1962 Seattle World's Fair.

https://m.

&feature=youtu.be