Sharing Memories Week 17: One Ringy Dingy Two Ringy Dingy

Olive Tree Genealogy blog has a Genealogy Writing Challenge. It's 52 weeks of writing your own memoirs.  Lorine will be posting a weekly prompt each Sunday on Olive Tree Genealogy blog under the topic Sharing Memories

The first week's prompt was about Kindergarten. You can read Lorine's blog post for the first week at Challenge: 52 Weeks of Writing Our Memories - Kindergarten Days

This week's prompt is One Ringy Dingy Two Ringy Dingy  All about telephones.

When I was little all the phones were rotary dial. I don't know if pushbutton phones had been invented but no one I knew had one. I imagine there are lots of young people who have never seen or used a rotary dial telephone.

My mother told me that when she was a little girl they had an old-fashioned crank phone and were on a party line. She said everyone on that line listened in on everyone else's conversations. You had to memorize your ring (2 short or 1 short 2 long for example) as everyone on the party line had their own ring.

My grandparents had a party line and I could never figure out whether or not we were supposed to answer it. I couldn't remember our pattern of short and long rings. But that didn't matter because my grandparents didn't believe that children should be answering the phone anyway.

My grandmother, who lived in a very small town, was an operator for Bell Telephone for many years. I remember her telling me how the operators liked to listen in on other people's phone calls even though that was strictly against company policy. She said that way they knew all the gossip. So if you are worried about Google and big tech companies looking at our stuff online, guess what? It's been going on forever, just in a different format!

Credits: "Vintage Telephone" by Daniel St.Pierre on FreeDigitalPhotos.net