Looking Back at Telephones

 

Dorothy Sargent Boudreau, my mother born 1917, never followed convention unless she wanted to.

Over the lifetime she had many careers when women didn't, including a cottage industry doll making, selling women's fashions on a party plan and finally as a journalist. Even after retirement, she wrote a weekly column about being over 60 and the changes she'd seen, a combination of nostalgia, amazement and sometimes fun.

Here is a column she wrote in 1968 about changes in telephones over her life.

There had never been any reason for me to call anyone in Europe, and I expected this call to my granddaughter in Munich might be fraught with complexities and delays.

Not so! I dialed 13 digits and ZIP, she could have been standing next to me, so clear was the connection. No operator involved -- just high technology in good order.

Llara, in Germany for a school year, was homesick her mother had told me, and my grandmotherly-heart strings zinged.

Call her. Call her right now, I said to myself. I had the number but then the time differential struck me. It was three in the afternoon here, but what time would it be there? I called my daughter right back.

"It's nine o'clock there and a good time to call," she said. And I I did just that immediately. It seemed like seconds when Llara was on the other end of the line.

"I'm homesick," she said in a voice obviously bordering on tears, a voice that returned to normalcy by the end of the overseas chat. 

While amazed that no operator has intervened in the Munich call, I thought back to the days when they said, "Number please," "That line is busy" and sometimes "That line is out of order."

You gave the town or city you were calling followed by four digits and a letter (M and J come to mind if a party line was involved.)

Instruments that bear little resemblance to today's phones. There were two parts to hold, one to speak into and the receiver to hold close to the ear.  Awkward then, archaic now. But sometimes contact with local operators was helpful indeed.

Never will I forget the night I stuttered into the phone trying to get a doctor for my stricken father. Not one, but three local physicians converged in the driveway having been alerted by the operator.

It wasn't only emergencies that the local exchange assisted. I remember at an early age and in my mother's absence asking an operator how to scramble eggs. She told me.

Back to the present.

While I marvel at being able to have crystal clear chats with Llara thousands of miles away, I dread to think of my bill when this globetrotting granddaughter goes to school in Australia two years from now.

I would love to know what my mother would think of mobile phones, aps, the internet. I suspect she would embrace them, especially the internet where she could easily locate information. I know she would love being able to call Llara anywhere in the world without needing a second mortgage to pay for it. And she could look up the recipe for scrambled eggs without asking anyone.

Dorothy Sargent Boudreau