1980 was a milestone year for us. We bought our first house
for $24,000 in the Riverwest neighborhood of Milwaukee. And we bought our first
phone. Back then you called the phone company, they installed a landline at
your house and you rented a phone for a monthly fee. But the phone company also
saw a future in selling phones to customers and set up a store in the mall. Dan
and I wandered in and fell in love with a retro looking dial-phone. (Push-button phones, while
available, were not entirely commonplace.) The price was $180 and when we compared
the monthly rental fee to the overall price it seemed worth it.
One month later we received a letter from the phone company,
basically outlining the cost of the internal working parts we might want to
purchase, now that we had bought the “shell” of the phone. What? Yes, that
would be another $180. So for $360 in 1980 ($1102 in 2015, adjusted for
inflation), we now were ahead of our peers and owned our own phone.
Two days ago, Dan called and cancelled the landline. These
days, the only calls we get are from our parents and telemarketers. The phone
will continue to hang on the wall, the source of many memories.
In the early days we got a lot of wrong numbers. “Is Rudy
dere?” was a common call. Apparently, our recycled number (258-1503) had
belonged to a very popular fellow named Rudy, as he was in constant demand. One
evening we had a party and the call for Rudy came through, Dan said hang on, I'll get him. Our friends knew all
about the Rudy calls and were happy to play along, picking up the phone for
over 90-minutes, letting the caller know that Rudy would be along in just a
minute.
There was the time Dan was helping out a friend on a
Saturday and I got a wrong number from a woman who didn't believe she had
dialed a wrong number. After taking that call a few more times I may have made
some comment about her intelligence. She called back one more time and
threatened to kill me. Home alone, I frantically called for back-up, finding Dan
on the other side of town. He and his friend made it back to the house in
record time, my knights in shining armor.
When Carl was just crawling his main objective was to get to
the long phone cord, happily stretching it out for extended periods of time.
Afraid that he'd pull the heavy handset down on his head, Dan purchased two
phone cords at American Science and Surplus and made a giant loop out of them
for his first birthday. Grandparents, aunts and uncles looked on with dismay as
he ignored a cornucopia of gifts in favor of this new phone cord toy.
When I was expecting Hunter I went into labor early. Dan was
out for the first time in a few months, with Malcolm, at Wolski’s. I used the
phone to call Dan there and heard the classic bartender call to the patrons “Is
there a Dan Johnson here?” When Dan got home, he called his parents house to
come pick up Carl. Their phone was busy, so after several tries Dan dialed “O”
for operator and asked her to break into the call (can you even do that anymore?). Dan heard his dad tell the operator he was going to have another
grandchild.
Later memories include Hunter’s friends coming over to the
house and needing to make a call for a ride. I’d point them to the rotary
phone. More than once I'd see a kid
pushing at the dial, trying to figure out how it worked. It was always a
pleasure to explain the retro technology. Place your finger in the hole with
the desired number, pull it all the way to the stop and remove your finger, letting
it rotate back into position…repeat with each number. No lightning fast dialing,
no caller ID, just basic pulse dialing technology.
Music that resonates:
Call me - Blondie
