Season 1, Episode 4: Functioning in Pre-Cell Phone America, Part 1
LISTEN TO THE EPISODE:
On Today’s Episode:
In 1926, Nikola Tesla - the famed inventor - sat down with John B. Kennedy of Collier’s Magazine for an interview.
In it, he predicts that people will be able to carry phones in there pocket, and will be able to see and hear one another as if we were right next to one another.
But could he have predicted the way that mobility has changed the way we live? And if he did, would he have approved?
In this 2-part series, I talked to a telephone expert and a good friend to ask the question: Has mobility improved or hindered the way we communicate today?
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FUN AND INFORMATIVE!
“Liz’s love and knowledge of history is evident just seconds into this podcast. I learned things I didn’t know and felt encouraged by the modern day takes on the topic. Well done and definitely worth your time! Can’t wait to see what the future holds for Was, Is, Could Be!”
With Special Guests:
Sarah Autumn - Sarah Autumn is a volunteer at the Connections Museum in Seattle, WA where she specializes in early 20th century telephone history. Her main role at the museum is the maintenance and restoration of telephone central office equipment from the 1920-1950 era, and her passion for this craft has earned her the honorary title of "Switch Witch." It's an appropriate moniker because the skills required to work on such large, complex, and obsolete machines look like magic to an outside observer. Sarah has traveled the country to track down and obtain some of the necessary parts and pieces for these machines, so they can be brought back to life for museum visitors to enjoy.
In her spare time, Sarah enjoys traveling, spending time with her cat, and playing a whole bunch of musical instruments. For her "day job", she is a technical educator at a Seattle area tech company.
John Nahor - John Nahor is a systems engineer who is fascinated by the way things work. Growing up in Old Forge, John found an appreciation for technology by tinkering with the abundant old equipment left in the basement of the 100 year old Tavern he grew up in. John is an avid hiker and proud dad.
Resources:
I find it almost impossible to explain ALL of the ideas and influences that come up while researching every episode. So here are just some of my most used and referenced resources for this week’s episode.
When Woman is Boss - The original text of the article citing Nikola Tesla as interviewed by John B. Kennedy. What he says about women is fascinating but the thoughts on phones is technically what pulled me in.
Connections Museum, Seattle - This episode would simply not have been possible without the Connections Museum where Sarah volunteers. If you’re in Seattle be sure to add this to your museum list!
Making a Long Distance Call... in 1949! - This YouTube video is all audio, but it accurately portrays what it would have been like to make a call back when operators were used! Note — it’s from a radio program and is not a real call.
Library of Congress Telephone Operator Pictures - One of my favorite places to research is the Library of Congress. For whatever reason, they have a significant number of pictures of old telephone operators and systems. Check them out to get a visual for many of the things discussed in today’s podcast episode!
Using the Telephone to Win World War II - Our episode briefly touches on the impacts of the war on using the phone to make international calls. But have you ever thought about how the phone influenced the war? Check out this cool video from the AT&T archives to learn more!
The Telephone Goes to War - Wonder how Roosevelt found out about Germany’s invasion of Poland? The telephone. I found this little blurb on Angelo State University’s website interesting!
Telephone Operators Used to be Rude Teenage Boys - I loved this story and wish I could have expanded on it more in the interview!
Bye Bye Birdie Telephone Hour Song - Sorry in advance for getting this song stuck in your head - it’s the one I mentioned in the episode. Whenever I think of party lines - this is literally what I picture!
Telephone Courtesy - This video made me laugh a little - “I’m going to look into this telephone thing!” If you’re ever wondering how people learned about the phone or how it was received in business, this is a good one!
The Was Is Could Be podcast is produced by Liz Russell at To Eat and To Love, LLC. Each episode is carefully edited by Joshua Rivers of Podcast Guy Media, LLC. Our theme music is made by Neil Cross and published by ImageCollect Publishing.
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Liz Russell: In 1926, Nikola Tesla - the famed inventor - sat down with John B. Kennedy of Collier’s Magazine for an interview.
The subsequent article is rather fascinating.
It’s called “when woman is boss” and it asserts that a new world order is coming — and that females will be superior.
But that’s not why this article floated around Facebook in 2016. Instead, it was Tesla’s prediction of the cell phone - almost 60 years before their existence - that has been intriguing audiences today.
This is Was Is Could Be and this is the story of communication in pre-cell phone America.
[🎶 Theme Music 🎶]
Liz Russell: Tesla has many predictions in this interview but the most stunning is what he says about wireless communications. He says:
“We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do his will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one right in his vest pocket.”
Sounds like he’s describing smart phones and FaceTime to me!
Even if Tesla is a bad predictor of women’s roles, it seems that he’s done a pretty bang up job of predicting the state of communications today.
But could he have predicted the way that mobility has changed the way we live? And if he did, would he have approved?
In this 2-part series, I talked to a telephone expert and a good friend to ask the question: Has mobility improved or hindered the way we communicate today?
Sarah Autumn: Hi, my name is Sarah and I basically love machines. Like anything that moves and makes noise is like kind of my thing. And I also really like learning and fixing things. Could be computers, cars, you know, anything that I can get my hands on, I love it. And I volunteer at the Connections Museum in Seattle, which is part of the Telecommunications History Group. And at the museum I restore and preserve antique telephone switching equipment. It all still works and we just keep it running for visitors to enjoy. Speaking personally for me, it's just incredible. The machines are amazing. You know, these aisles of equipment are 12 feet tall and you can walk through them and it's almost like walking through a living, breathing computer that's moving and making noise around you. Why does the museum preserve it? Well, it's culturally important and it gives a lot of context to not only the evolution of technology, but the giant, just massive industry and livelihood and all this stuff that went behind something that we take for granted today.
Liz Russell: I found the Connections Museum online while doing research for this episode, and I was able to talk to Sarah across multiple interviews about how phones have changed our lives.
Sarah Autumn: You know like, everybody knows Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, but it wasn't really just him. It was him, and you know, working with, you know, not only Thomas Watson, but there are a couple of other inventors around the country and around the world working on the same technology at the same time. He actually just got to the patent office two hours before the other guy. So the patent was awarded to him. And at first, you know, in the late 18 hundreds, the average person may have just seen a telephone as a curiosity almost as kinda like we've, we might view something like virtual reality now in 2019 -- like, sure, it's cool, but what am I going to do with it? And it wasn't until the first switchboards started coming out and you know, that the telephone really became useful because at first you could only connect one telephone to another telephone, and sure, that was nice, but it wasn't until one person can call many people that it, you know, that people really started to see the advantage of having one.
And some of the first telephone exchanges were installed in cities like New Haven, Connecticut and Boston, Massachusetts. And, uh, you know, the very early adopters, somewhat unsurprisingly, were businesses. You know, if you looked at an early telephone directory from, you know, the late 18 hundreds or the early 19 hundreds, you'd see people like doctors, like butchers, like fishmongers and people like that who use the telephone to communicate between themselves and also to communicate with their customers if they were lucky enough to have telephones as well.
Liz Russell: and so if you're a business, you're doing this, you're calling another business. What was the impact to business by being able to do this?
Sarah Autumn: Well you know, think about, uh, you know, previous to telephones, the best way to communicate was either, you know, by a messenger telegram or simply by sending mail. So what, what the telephone helped businesses do was speed up the rate at which business was conducted. So rather than waiting a day or two days, or even up to a week for a reply, you could simply call your customer or call your warehouse and, you know, have a shipment out the same day. So really, you know, in today's fast paced world, the telephone is somewhat responsible for that.
Liz Russell: Amazing. Okay. So how did they get from being a thing of business to being a home based tool?
Sarah Autumn: One of the, one of the biggest challenges to the early adoption of telephones was actually just running lines because of course, you know, at this point we're just talking about simple landline phones. And in order for some residential customer to have a phone, they had to have a line, you know, physical wires running into their house. And you know, that actual process took many years and a lot of money to complete. It's actually kind of funny because in rural areas, farmers were mostly responsible for running their own lines and they just used the same barbed wire fences that kept their cattle, you know, in the grazing area. So, you know, if there was a storm or a cow escaped and your fence broke while your telephone was out too.
As people started realizing the convenience of just being able to talk to whoever they wanted to at any given time, you know, at some point it went from this curiosity to, “Oh, I can call my friend across town and that's awesome”. Or “I could call the doctor when I'm sick” or “I can call and have things delivered”. And,as the convenience was realized by people, it just so happened that concurrently the telephone company was making a big push to get telephone lines put everywhere, uh, at least in major cities. So we had places like New York, Boston, Washington D.C. all getting this network built. And it just so happened that, at the same time, people were realizing how nice it was to be able to pick up this telephone and just talk to whoever you wanted to talk to right away.
By far the largest and fastest expansion of telephones was in New York City. And in fact, the, you know, the population in New York City, which actually peaked sometime around 1910, was probably the single biggest driver for the adoption of the telephone in, you know, the whole country.
Liz Russell: I loved the idea of humans just really wanting to talk so bad that phones kind of blew up everywhere. But what did talking on the phone really look like? Before there were computer chips to save phone numbers and to count your phone minutes, how did basic wire-to-wire conversations really work?
Sarah Autumn: So, yeah, with really, you know, the, the older phones, there wasn't a dial like we're used to today. And you'd pick up the receiver off the hook and you would, an operator would say, “number, please”. And you would tell the operator, you know, “connect me to so-and-so”.
Operators were essential to the communities they served their, their basic job was to connect your call to the party you wish to speak to. And they had auxiliary tasks, like in addition to plugging cords into the proper jacks, they also record the billing information for each call and monitored their boards for signals for subscribers who had hung up or who wished to recall the operator to speak to them again for some reason. And each operator was firmly trained in etiquette and how to handle the various situations that she would encounter on her daily job. But more than just the duties of the job, the operator really was central to the community because in any town, you know, however many operators you had, they had they were the hub for gossip and for who was talking to who and who had called the police department, the fire department, and what was going on in town.
Way back in the early days, the first operators were young boys. But as the story goes, they were really rude and kind of uncouth and the customers ended up complaining. So the phone companies, realizing that something had to be done, they had this idea of employing young women instead, since it was thought that they were naturally more docile and polite than men were, which is funny ‘cause it's really sexist by today's standards. But back then it proved to be the correct answer.
And of course they were under strict rules to maintain etiquette and maintain professionalism. But of course, if you were buddy-buddy with an operator, you could talk to them and get all the cool gossip that was going on in town. But, an important and sometimes overlooked aspect of an operator's job was that they were often the last ones to leave during an emergency, like a fire or other natural disaster. And there's plenty of accounts of operators staying at their posts during times of critical emergency and relaying calls to and from first responders. So, from my perspective, it seems like operators were unsung heroes and they took their jobs very seriously for the most part. You know, like Seattle, we had a blizzard in, you know, 1920-something. These operators stayed there. They stayed at their posts. You know, they wanted to go home to their families, but they couldn’t.
Liz Russell: So they're pretty local to a community in the sense I think we've been talking about them, but what happens, you know, if I'm in upstate New York and I want to call Seattle, where are the operators located? How did that work?
Sarah Autumn: Well, when you picked up your phone, the operator that you spoke to initially was called “the A operator”. That was just the uncreative name they were given. And you would ask the A operator for long distance and the A operator would plug your cord into a long distance jack on their board. Then the long distance operator would answer and she would say “long distance, number please”. And then you would say, “get me Seattle. I want to talk to Melrose three seven three one two” and the long distance operator would start the process of connecting you. Now on the way from New York to Seattle, the long distance operator may actually have to go through several tandem points. That's what they were called is “tandem points” that would basically be hops along the way and eventually they would get to Seattle. The operator in the Melrose office, for instance, in Seattle would answer, the long distance operator would convey the number to them and then they would finally plug in their cord and your connection would be made. So sometimes long distance connections could take up to 10 minutes to cut through and the operator would actually just say, “I'll call you”, which meant that you were to hang up your telephone. And the operator would call you back once the connection was made.
So even overseas there were precious few circuits, so those calls were always very expensive and you would do the same thing. You'd tell your local operator that you wanted to make an international call and they would get you out to an international operator who would then would have trunks, or lines to major points like Paris, London, Barcelona, and so on. But, it's worth mentioning that, especially during the Second World War, overseas calls and long distance calls for the general public were very, very discouraged. In fact, there were tons of ads taken out in local papers and magazines saying, you know, “Keep your calls to five minutes or less. The war needs the lines.”
Liz Russell: I also wanted to understand the changing role of operators. When did operators cease to become so important?
Sarah Autumn: So AT&T by 1914 or 1915, they had already begun work on a machine-switching system. That's what we would call, you know, a telephone switch or a telephone exchange nowadays. And at first they were sort of preparing for it to be a semi-mechanical system and that means that operators would still answer the phone when you picked up the call. But now the operators would simply use keys at their desk to punch in the number that you wanted to call and in the semi-mechanical system would take over. And that would still give the customers the sense of speaking to an operator. But there would be a machine behind the scenes doing all the work. Well that didn't exactly go as planned because after World War I there was an operator strike and also a general labor shortage and a lot more people wanted telephones. And this kind of had the effect of forcing AT&T’s hand a little bit. And AT&T said, well we have to go ahead and move forward with fully automatic exchanges. And the first places these were deployed were New York City where there were already hundreds of telephone exchanges just in the New York Metro area alone. And they began deploying machine-switching exchanges there.
I will put a little asterisk there and say that the first fully-automatic telephone switch deployed by AT&T in particular was in Omaha, Nebraska in 1921. They tended to deploy new technologies in smaller towns where there was a bit more control. If you look at them deploying any new first iteration of a new technology, you wonder - why Morris Illinois, why Omaha, Nebraska, you know, why these small places? And it was because they had more control and they had a smaller sample size and they could sort of, if it didn't work out, they had an exit strategy.
Liz Russell: One of those songs that gets just stuck in my head the minute I think of it is from Bye Bye Birdie,and it’s toward the beginning of the film, when Hugo and Kim have that quintessential high school moment when they decide to go steady. At the end of the day, Kim hops on the line with all of her friends, and they jump into a singing number with what seems like the entire town. And it seems like they’re doing it on a single party line. I wanted Sarah to weigh in on party lines because I just think those could get soo awkward!
Sarah Autumn: Yeah. So party lines were a normal part of talking on the telephone up to and even a little after World War II and they kind of were a thing because in the first half of the 20th century, telephone companies couldn't run enough lines for everybody to have their own individual telephone line. And this worked like you would basically share a telephone line with one or more of your neighbors on your block. And because you are sharing the line, only one of you could use the phone at any time.
So because everyone was sharing a line, neighbors would eavesdrop on each other. And if you just picked up the phone, and your neighbor was on the line, you could totally just hear their conversation. So people were encouraged to be polite and only be on the phone when they had to. This was also because if you were using the phone, your neighbors couldn't use it so they couldn't make or receive calls because again, you are all just sharing one line. So there was this really interesting, social aspect of having a party line where you know, like you could spy on your neighbors and at the same time you were not supposed to be on the phone unless you needed to. And I don't know how well people followed those sort of like, rules of courtesy and politeness.nI suspect it varied. The other thing about party lines is that depending on what kind of service you had, all phones on the party line would ring at once. So this was especially true in more rural areas where you might be sharing a line with up to eight and sometimes even more other people. So when any of those, let's say eight people got a phone call, all eight phones would ring. And what you had to do was basically listen to the cadence of the ring to determine if that call was for you or not because every person had their own ring pattern.
So, party line was gradually discontinued during and after the 1950s. It's interesting to note that one of our volunteers who worked for the phone company since the 1940s basically had free service for life and he had a party line here in Seattle up until the 1980s. He was perfectly happy with it. He never asked to upgrade. And basically by 1980, there were no more party lines in Seattle. So his line was effectively an individual line just like everybody else's. I guess internally in the company, he was still, like, listed as having a party line until one day the phone company called him in the 80s and said, we can't give you a party line anymore. We have to give you an individual line, and he just said, “okay, whatever.”
Liz Russell: I did not grow up with party lines but I DO remember the days when you could pick up a phone in the other room and secretly listen to a person’s conversation. To do it to someone in a whole different house though - that seems like an extra level of creepy to me. At the same time - it seemed like you would have to battle to use phone lines across your neighborhood. I asked Sarah to weigh in on that possible frustration.
I mean, it seems very chaotic to me to pick up the phone and have, you know, your 15 year old next door neighbor talking to her friend when you're in the middle of an emergency. How did that kinda work?
Sarah Autumn: This was totally a thing. And the phone company actually released films to encourage people to be polite and to not use the phone excessively if they were on a party line. And the films sort of showed one neighbor, his house was burning down or something and they were desperately trying to call for emergency services, but they couldn't because the other person on the party line was just, you know, going on and on about something that was, you know, gossipy or not important. So yeah, emergencies were totally a thing and all they could do is just encourage people to be polite. And if there was an emergency and your neighbor asked you to get off the phone, please get off the phone. You know, cause like, you know, really bad stuff is happening.
And it's important to remember that when party lines were common, it was just an accepted fact. You know, it certainly wasn't, you know, from our perspective here, we think it's, wow, it must be weird to have a party line, but when that's all you had and there was no concept of anything else, you know, it was just, that's how the telephone worked.
Certainly by the years following the second world war in the 1950s, the telephone had solidified itself in the American consciousness. It was like, you know, having a radio. It was almost inconceivable not to have a telephone in your home.
Liz Russell: Ok - from a technical standpoint - I’m totally getting it.
But here’s the thing: I grew up in the 90s. So I do remember pre-cell phone America - kind of. But I was 16 when I got my first cell phone. So I do remember having to use the house phone before that to call my friends, and I do remember going out in the world without a phone but I don’t really remember a time in my adult life when I was ever without a phone.
I DO remember a time in my family when access to the phone was truly a point of contention. My memory of it is a little bit fuzzy, but the story goes something like this: My brother left for Iraq around my mom’s birthday and from that day on, no one was allowed to even think about using the house phone unless it was an absolute emergency. My mom really wanted the lines fully open, just in case. And since it was pre-cell phone America, it felt like we were basically isolated.
Truth be told, I’d thought she’d gone a bit mental. So, when I began exploring telephone history, I asked her to tell me her version of that story.
She just laughed and said “you’ll never forgive me for that will you.” But then I finally got her to do an interview, and here is what she had to say.
Nanci Russell: After Jonathan was in training with the Marine Corps, he got sent to Camp Pendleton, which is pre-training to head into Iraq and he was there on his 21st birthday. I couldn't call him, there was no contact. He found a phone and kept calling and evidently the phone was busy and he spent quite a long time trying to get through. If I remember the operator cut in and said we had a collect phone call from Jonathan from Camp Pendleton. I don't remember who was on the phone. I don't remember any of that. I took the call and he was really upset because he couldn't get through and it was his birthday. So we finished the conversation with him and, I don't remember the timeframe, but he went into Iraq in March. And he always called weird hours. We never knew when, we never knew... it was, I don't, whenever he got to a, a place in Iraq that he's allowed to use a phone, he called home. So in talking to him, the phone calls were obviously intense because in the background you could hear the bombing, you could hear just stuff that you wouldn’t normally, normally hear on a phone call. So I knew how important it was that he got through to us whenever he called them, no matter when it was. And he knew when he got to a phone he knew where I would be if I wasn't home. So when any of us were home, at five o'clock, nobody was allowed to use the phone because it was very important that Jonathan got in contact with us.
I don't remember if I tried to get call waiting or if call waiting wasn't around then, but even with call waiting, nobody was going to use the phone cause it was really important that he got through.
He was there. He was there seven months. I felt like I talked to him four or five times. It wasn't very often. He had to wait until he got to a camp and that's when he got to shower and that's when he got to eat real food, when every so often he got to go into a camp. Other than that he was out in the field sleeping in ditches and eating MREs and he had no phone. He just had a radio. But when he got to camp, they were allowed to use the phone if it was available. And if things aren't going on at the time.
Liz Russell: I’m pretty sure we didn’t have cell phones yet though. I’m thinking of that based on my age when I got a cell phone. So how did it work when you were at work? Were you worried that you would be missing him there too?
Nanci Russell: Well he knew when I worked and I worked for the town so he knew where I was as far as work and I don't... The only time he ever called me at work was when he left Iraq and when he arrived in Ireland, I believe it was, all of the American Legion members in Ireland -- I don't know what they were called --l all had cell phones waiting for all of the military guys when I got off the plane and they were allowed to call anywhere that they needed to call. And that's the only time Jonathan ever called me at work was when he called to tell me he was out of Iraq. And then he called me again when he got to, I think it was Camp Pendleton again to say that he was on American soil, so that was the only two times that he called me at work.
Liz Russell: Were you surprised when you found out he was coming home? Like, did you know he was on his way?
Nanci Russell: I know it was about time for him to leave, but they didn't tell us the exact date. So when Jonathan called yes, I was very surprised. I got a hold of dad right away. And then I remember I went right to school to tell you guys. And I remember not having your schedule and having to go to Laura Marlowe and ask that I wanted to go see you guys. Could you tell me what class you were in? And she said, well it's easier for me to call it then down to the office. And I didn't want her to do that because I didn't want to alarm anybody, but she did it anyway. And I remember when you guys turned the corner, I started to cry. But that was when he was on American soil.
Liz Russell: So that was it - that was my big “no phone” period of my life. And obviously, we all survived.
What I never did though -- in pre-cell America -- was be an adult. I was just a kid at the time! So I wasn’t engaging in business. I wasn’t managing a team. I wasn’t trying to navigate long-distance relationships and friendships. I wasn’t really even away from home or definitely wasn’t trying to parent.
By the time I WAS doing all of those things, cell phones were not only around but they were everywhere all the time.
So I understood all of what Sarah was saying about making a phone call, and sure, I remember a time when having a landline did cause some strife…but in a way, this world was still really, really foreign to me. I had to know more - what was living in the pre-cell phone America really like?
I decided to ask my friend John, who is older than me and who therefore can remember more about life with landlines. He is also a systems engineer so he is a great critical thinker about this type of thing, and wonderful to talk to.
John Nahor: Like I know our home phone number was 205. I remember that still. So if I was away somewhere and wanting to call home, it was, you know, “number please” “205” -- they connected us. What was interesting too about the whole operators -- ‘cause it was a small town -- the operators knew everything that was going on in the town. So you could try to get ahold of the next door neighbors because you want to go out and play or something and see if they're home. But the operator would know, “Oh the decamps aren't home today. They went to Utica.” Or you know, and then there was also stories about like -- ‘cause I wasn’t old enough -- but um like if someone had a baby it was always through the operator like “Oh did you hear that this is going on”. So all the gossip through the town, like funneled through the operators cause they knew everything that was going on, which was good and bad cause it was actually good in a lot of times they were able to help people out because they knew what was going on or someone hadn't made that phone call that they're talked to them that day that they usually where they could alert someone to go check on them or something like that.
Liz Russell: So if you’re walking down the street and you see an operator… because they people lived in town I’m assuming...
John Nahor: You know, it’s funny. I don't know who the operators were. I know, I know. So I don't know. They were kind of, to me back then it was like this magic person who was at the other end of the phone. And I didn't know until later on that they, that they were actually in Old Forge, and there was actually like next to the hardware store, there was a building and it had the, it was the Bell Telephone building and it had the a operators with the switchboards in there. And I didn't know that until later. I wish I had known that because I would have liked to have seen what it actually looked like. But that's where it was located. And it's kind of funny because I'm sure my parents knew who they were and stuff like that, but I didn't know who they were.
Liz Russell: How did you know everyone's phone numbers? Everyone's three digit number.
John Nahor: So you got, yeah, you got the phone book every year. So I remember the phone book maybe just covering maybe the Town of Webb area, but then I remember as it, we expanded the phone... ‘cause they went and they changed like the long distance. What was long distance... like even to call Inlet, which was the closest town to us. That would be like a long distance call and then, but they weren't in our phone book. You had to have a different phone book. Then they started combining the phone books. So you had like Boonville, Inlet, Old Forge and Forestport were all in one phone book. Where they used to be all separate phone books, if I remember correctly.
Liz Russell: So your parents had family in Ireland, how would you know what the phone numbers were in Ireland? Like how did that part work.
John Nahor: So they somehow... they had to set the whole thing up to make a call to Ireland. ‘Cause in their town, they didn't have phones way back when, like say we're talking about the time when it was still you had to talk to the operator. And actually I think even when it started, even when the dial thing happened, they would have to, in Ireland they were even farther behind, where it would be just like one phone in the town or a couple phones in the town. So it'd be like, like the post office had the phone. So they would have to like write letters to communicate as to when a time would be to call. So they had it... So you had the people... so there was a, this is logistically you think back about it. It wasn't that big of a deal back then. But now he's like, it's crazy because they would have to like say, okay you gotta be in town at the post office. Cause they had, you know, the relatives all had farms outside of town and stuff. So they had to get into the town, get to like the, the post office or the phone was, and then on my mom's side, I think at our house, they had arranged with the phone company to be able to make a long distance call ‘cause you couldn't just dial up and call overseas. You had to schedule a time where you could use a line that was available for you to make that call. So there was a whole bunch of scheduling that had to go on there just to make a phone call overseas.
Liz Russell: And did they like know the number or did they say like, okay, I'm going to call this town in Ireland?
John Nahor: That's a, that's a good question. Um, I think they, I think it was a combination of knowing like some type of area equivalent to like an area code of the area. Then getting to area in Ireland and the switchboard is there. And then talking about what town it is and where it was. It's not like today having a phone number assigned to it.
Liz Russell: So if you're in town, let's say you're at the diner. Yup. You decide you need to call somebody. How would you have done that back in the day?
John Nahor: So say, you’re at the diner and you have to ask the people that have the diner, “can I use your phone” to be able to use the phone? And it's their business phone, so sometimes you could, sometimes you couldn't and they didn't want everyone just using their phone. And most places are like that. They just didn't, you know, it was obviously a business phone, so you couldn't be tied up with anything. So if they let you use the phone, you’d picked it up and waited for the operator to ask you the number. And like I said, I would say “205” was our home. So dial in there and uh, in, in connecting. Yeah. That was it. And then also there was, so there was also payphones around too, so you'd have to, same thing, you'd pick it up and you'd have to have some change with you. And I can't remember how much, ‘cause it seems like way back when it was like a dime would've been too much.’ Cause I can remember when dime... later on when I was like more of a teenager, like it would cost a dime to make a pay phone call and then uh, and then you could, you know, dial it up, dial the phone up.
When you use the pay phone, when you put it down, if you went over the time, the operator would come on and tell you you need this much more for a minute. And they'd always entered, you know, and it wasn't like, “well I'm just trying to finish up the call” and like, Nope, you need to put, you need to deposit, you know, 50 cents. And they would hold off the... they would stop the call there.
Liz Russell: Tell me about the switch from using operators to dial tone. Like what do you remember of that?
John Nahor: At some point we got a phone that had a dial on it, but we still hadn't, you still had to talk to the operator. And I remember even wondering like, “why do we have this dial? What is this for?” And then, and then eventually they removed the operators, then you could do the dial, then it was getting used to, cause now you have to pick up and wait for a dial tone. And then you had also… so there's no operator interference there. So you had to know, like now there's all tones. Like you had a busy signal, which wasn't like that before. The operator just told you “they're on a line” or “there's no one was home”. Like, you know, Old Forge is small enough for like I said, they, they could say “bah, there's nobody home there”. So not to do it or if someone's already on the phone there but yeah, so you had to learn this whole new kind of lingo of okay.... And at first really sometimes you'd pick up the phone, you wouldn't have a dial tone, something wasn't working right ‘cause they're just figuring the system out. So you had to know... you had to get that dial tone before you could start dialing.
So at first too, ‘cause you still, when you dialed….you didn't have like the number like you have now - like an area code, the three digit number, then the four digit number... some phone numbers had letters in it. So that's why you had on the, if you notice on your dial, it used to be the phone numbers would be like, like “HK72184” you know. So we didn't, we didn't have any of the letters and stuff, but I remember that... uh, ‘cause I think that my, like my, I, you know my parents had relatives in New York City and they had like letters. I think they had like letters you had to have for when they were dialing at first and then eventually they finally changed it to the, you know, the l..., the area code and the nu... number and stuff. So it was uh... I probably easier to remember the numbers then... like whatever letters you had to remember. It was one thing if it spelled out words like they do today, but that wasn't like it back then. It was just these random letters. Maybe they meant something to something, but I'm not sure what they meant.
Liz Russell: I then asked John about call waiting.
John Nahor: So there was no indication that you were getting another call. So if someone's trying to call, all you got was a busy signal. Now if you had some emergency and I remember having to do this ‘cause I had to call my house and it was like I said earlier, the phone was in the bar. Sometimes people maybe had too much to drink and would pick up the phone and make phone calls and be on there for quite some time. And so, you know, as a kid, you needed to get ahold of your parents because you know, and you only had like this one shot basically. It's not like you had a cell phone. You could try again some other time. You had a phone available or you just wasted your last dime to use on this, on the, uh, payphone, the, um, so you could also call the operator in an emergency and have the operator interrupt that call so they would break into the call to say, you know, there's someone needs to get through here. You got to hang up or, you know, pass the phone to someone else cause we got an emergency here going on. I always felt like you really shouldn't do that unless it was really an emergency. But, um, a lot of times you would try to get ahold of your friend's house and it was always, you know, I mean, it's not an emergency. It's, it's busy, it's busy, it's busy and stuff.
Liz Russell: What if like your parents weren't home though, you, they don't have a cell phone for you to get ahold of them. You are in an emergency somewhere else. How did that work? Like it's to a millennial that sounds like mass chaos.
I don’t know if you can tell, but I was starting to get stressed out about this idea of having limited way of communicating.
John Nahor: Well back then, you kind of knew that you couldn't communicate, so you didn’t have… so it wasn't like you had this, like you had a cell phone and suddenly you didn't, like, you just knew that there was times you couldn't communicate. You had to plan, like emergencies, obviously you wouldn't plan for. But for other things you kind of had to plan ahead to know when someone was going to be home or when not to call. Like you could... you knew like people were at work, you're not going to call them at work or they're at school, you know, at different times. Like, now it seems like you can just call someone at any time and either they're gonna see your number and they’ll know to call you back or they can answer the phone at any time cause it's in your pocket and ready to go. There, you didn't have the phone in your pocket, you just, you had to be in the house to get the phone. So you'd hope like, you know… the best you could do is like call, get somebody to take a message, they have to write it out, write it out… there wasn't even answering, answering machines back then. You had to write out the message and you know, “Liz called, call her back” something and uh… or you just missed the call. So there'll be times, so say some emergency happened. The best you could do is try to call and leave a message with someone that answered the phone. If no one was there, it was just, you know, whenever the people got back, say something happened to me, I... like, I broke my leg or something like that never happened, but say it. But when, so they and my parents weren't home, they, you know, we would try, okay no one answers. Well I'd have to go get my leg taken care of and stuff like that. And eventually my parents would be at a phone where someone would call them or see them and, and say, “Hey, your son's in the hospital”. Then they would go to the hospital. You had to rely on other people to help you out to take care of you. It wasn't like you had them… they'll take you to the hospital. But it's, I think, I don't know if that makes sense.
Liz Russell: It makes total sense. But it sounds like it requires so much public trust because you're kind of in a situation where you're like, I have to trust that the ambulance people are like gonna take care of me and go ahead. And I have to trust that when I get to the hospital, you know, if somebody, somehow my parents are going to find out where I am and that it’ll be….
John Nahor: It wasn't uncommon that like the parents would show.... other people would be at the hospital from other things... and the parents would show up later because they... it was just a matter of when that communication can happen with them. It wasn't instant communication and it was just not... and it was not... it wasn't like that was like, Oh you're a bad parent or anything like that. It was just that that's the way you can only communicate so, so fast. And remember even before phones… you know, it was like, it was letters before that. So this is like a step up having a phone and you can, yeah, or the thing would be like call a neighbor and have the neighbor go find the parents or something like that. Or what's going on? Why isn't someone answering the phone or why... where do they, you know... when they were, you would expect them to be there and they're not, or something like that.
Liz Russell: In a way it sounds like kind of beautiful because there's this sense of community that I feel like doesn't exist today. So if something happened to me right now, actually this happened when I had my first trigeminal neuralgia attack, I drove myself to the hospital.
I could actually recall a recent time when what John was saying could have totally applied to my own life. You see, back in 2018, I was flying back home from a work conference when I got this crazy, crazy pain in my head and face. I actually had thought that maybe I had had a stroke… which sounds a little crazy but I hadn’t had a stroke before so I didn’t really know what else could lead to such face pain. So I decided to tough it out and I went home, and I lived with the pain for about 5 days. On the fifth day, I was in so much pain, I was having so much numbness in my face, that I had to go to the hospital. But my boyfriend who lives with me was not home and I really didn’t want to call an ambulance because I had been living o.k. for 5 days and I didn’t feel like it was a real enough emergency to bother them. So I ended up driving myself to the emergency room. Which it turns out was a pretty bad idea because that type of face and head pain can be indicative of certain injuries like brain injuries, where you definitely should not be operating a vehicle. So by the time I go to the hospital, I was given medicine and told I could not drive, and I ended up calling my parents -- who live more than two hours away -- to come and pick me up from the hospital. Now, they had to drive in such a way that they could drive themselves and then drive my car home so two of them ended up coming and it really, altogether, was just huge ordeal for everybody, mostly a major inconvenience. I had never once thought to walk next door and ask one of my neighbors for help. It’s not that they wouldn’t have helped -- I’m certain that they would have. Many of them are retired and home during the day. But I just never thought of them as being a network of people that could help me because I just don’t know them that well. So after some inconvenience and a new medical diagnosis, I was able to get home and everything worked out fine. But as John said this to me, it occurred to me that it would have been really nice and beautiful and wonderful to have lived in the way that he’s talking about where he could have relied on these neighbors and known that Brad, my boyfriend, would have gotten the message when he’d gotten home or when he was able to look at his cell phone while he was out of town.
John Nahor: It seemed like back then. I don't know, maybe like, like now where I live, I don't really know my neighbors at all. I dunno what they do, barely know their names and a lot of them... I don't know their names and stuff like that. But it seems like back then you knew your neighbors more and it might be that you had to because, you know, you're limited on what TV you could watch. You were limited, there was no video games. You, you had to get out and socialize or even you had to...the stuff you did was more around the neighborhood. So you couldn't just be on the phone to somebody else that you knew from somewhere else. The people you knew were really in your neighborhood and uh, and everyone helped out each other.
Liz Russell: Was it stressful not being able to get ahold of people or like having to always... ‘cause again...
John Nahor: See I don't think, I don't remember it being stressful as much as just knowing, oh that's the way it is. ‘Cause now it seems like you expect someone, you call someone and you expect them to pick up cause you know, well they have their phone with them. Then it was you, it was just okay. Um, we, it wasn't like taking a chance, but it was like, okay, you tried, you, you made that attempt. You tried. And that was all, that's all you can do. And if, if it worked great, if it didn't work out, the person was around and you'd just have to wait and wait around and see what happens.
And I think back then you did a lot more planning where it was like, you know, in advance when you saw people, you made plans like, okay, we're as kids like, oh, we're going to have a baseball game after dinner. So that six 30 everybody show up at the field or you're going to play at ….and word got around. So nowadays it'd be like, you know, 5:45 or 6:00 you get on the cell phone or send text like, okay, everyone come, you know, and I need to be, need that immediate reaction to do it. And everyone jumped on it. Where before you, you kinda had a plan, you know, it was like, okay, you knew like, Oh yeah, it's just going to be a baseball game later today or something. Or you heard about it or you know, it's sp... you know, information moved from person to person still just like differently.
Liz Russell: How? Like if you're gonna set up a baseball game, you just, it's when you saw someone on the street, you'd be like, Oh Hey, we're going to...,
John Nahor: Then they would see someone else. Yeah, they, yeah, definitely. It was not a immediate thing. It was a like a, you know, Oh, we're going to go see these other people. We'll be down or we'll be down in this part of the neighborhood. We'll tell these, these kids...I'm going to see these kids at church or something like that. So there was a place to, you know, there was like more like community events where you would get you see people and, and be able to communicate.
Liz Russell: Ok, so being a kid in the neighborhood was one thing, but what about as you get older and your needs change?
John Nahor: I would've been going to college like in the early eighties. So when I first went and living in the dorms, if you wanted to have a phone and you really didn't have a phone in your room. It was like either the dorms weren't set up physically to have a phone room or if you wanted a phone, it was so expensive you couldn't really afford it. And so there was always a payphone in the, in like the lounge, in the basement of the dorm. So at night it was like everyone...you know, you're homesick, you're away from home and stuff, you want to call your parents or your friends or whatever. You'd have to basically go down to the basement in the lounge and get in line to use the phone.
And then the phone… I remember the college I went to first, the phone, it wasn't really in a booth, it was like the pay phone was kind of in a corner cube type thing, but it was open to one side. So people got nasty ‘cause someone would get on the phone and people started yelling. They get off the phone ‘cause they wanted, you know, there's a big line. I mean basically you stood in line for quite some time. It'd be over an hour or something like that just to use the phone and, and people are yelling for people to get off the phone and stuff like that. And uh, you know, it was like these people are just on the phone or just doing what you want to do. Just talk to somebody, check in and all that and say, tell your parents, “Hey yeah, I'm okay.” and stuff. But it was... like today I don't think that's a problem at all.
Liz Russell: So was it every night or was it like every Friday was the most…
John Nahor: It’s... I'm not sure ‘cause I wouldn't try to make a phone call all the time, but you'd go down there and it was always a line. It seemed like if you wanted to make a phone call, there was a line. And so you in the dorms were pretty big and, and there's one phone…. there's one payphone or maybe there's two pay phones. Maybe there was another area. ‘Cause I think the dorm I was in like kind of split two ways on probably there was, and we didn't go on the other side, but so you had, um, all these people who were trying to use the phone but uh...And I think the RAs had phones in their rooms, but they had to for emergencies I think. But, but you knew you couldn't really use those phones, you wouldn't be allowed to use those phones. Those were for like for emergencies only I think, to get ahold of the campus police or to uh, you know, the, the fire department or something like that. And um...yeah, the regular phone, it was like pretty interesting.
Liz Russell: Eat or be eaten it sounds like, jeez.
John Nahor: Yeah, yeah. I remember I used to, I remember one time in particular, there was this girl that was just, she was way back in line and she was just yelling at every person is on the phone and she's just yelling how like they literally start talking and then she's yelling and yelling and then, and I was behind her and when she got on the phone, she was on there longer than anyone else. And she, ‘cause she's like, you're taking too long. You're taking too long, isn't it? She's like, you know, up. And she's like forever on, it was like you wanted to just, you know, killer strangle her with the phone card.
Liz Russell: But even like office buildings, like I have phone meetings, I probably have 10 a day sometimes. Sometimes I only have like 4... I'm exaggerating, but you know, all of those meetings are with people in Kansas City and D.C. and Montana and Texas. And I'm assuming those still had to occur then, probably less often because the world was far less integrated. But … like were there conference lines?
John Nahor: When I did finally like go to a big company to work in. This would have been in the early nineties. So I went to work for Kodak. So Kodak had their own telephone company and it was like the fifth largest telephone company in the world or something like crazy like that or six it was like in the top 10 of size of you know… and over the time that I worked there they sold it off to like stuff like I'm not sure if it was AT&T or the different ones that were going around in the 90s but you know, some other bigger company took it over or a company that became a big company took it over cause it, cause they weren't, they shouldn't have been in the phone businesses but their point...But at the time, and I, I believe that probably General Motors probably had their own phone company and Chrysler and all the big companies had their… if you were probably a Fortune 500 company, you probably had you had your own staff and phone company and stuff going on there.
They had people on staff that was, there was the phone company part of the company that was, that's what they did. They install line, install phones and all that and made sure everything worked, took care of all the switching and all that stuff that went on. And I remember we called the KMX. I don't know what it stood for right now, but uh, it was like a system where you could get ahold of people. So I could walk up to a, back then still it was all pay phones…. pay phones were everywhere. So I walk up the pay phone and dial a 800 number so you don't have to put any money in. And I would get into KMX and in there I could move around the phone system for the company. So if I knew numbers, people's numbers, I could call them through there and also leave messages for people and... and then I could also get any messages I had. So it was like a way of communicating through, um, the... to get onto system, to communicate within the system.
Liz Russell: And just like that my mind had been blown….
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Next time on Was Is Could Be - all of the other things ways cell phones have changed the way we function.