By Gladys C. May
The first telephone we had in our home was a wooden wall model with a hand crank.
We had the only phone in the community in 1929, the year I was born, because my
father worked for the Texas Forest Service and needed to be able to communicate
information about forest fires. My parents were called upon to deliver messages
to neighbors. By the time I was 7, we had a 5-line switchboard in our house
that was furnished by the U.S. Forest Service. By then, a few neighbors had
phones, but my parents still delivered many messages. During World War II, it
was their sad duty to deliver death messages to families of servicemen. Toward
the end of the 1940s, the Forest Service put two-way radios in our house, in
all of the lookout towers, and in the Forest Service trucks. We still operated
the switchboard to have connections with the ranger station in Huntsville and
with neighbors, and we still had a hand crank to ring the phones for a long
time.
The operator in town could be reached by plugging a telephone jack into the
first line on the switchboard and turning the crank for one long ring. When the
operator answered, she said,
“Number please.” We would give her the number, and she would connect us. Everyone had two-digit
phone numbers. Neighbors and other tower stations could be reached by ringing a
certain number of long and short rings on the other lines on the switchboard.
Since it was a party line, the phone rang at everyone
’s house, but they only answered their ring. It was considered rude to listen to
a neighbor
’s call. One of my father’s tasks was to keep the phone lines repaired. I remember going with him to help
watch for a limb on a line, which had disrupted service. Fixing it was as
simple as getting the limb off the line.
Since telephones were not in every home, people communicated by writing letters.
We had Rural Free Delivery in the country. That meant that a mail carrier drove
our route and put our mail in a mailbox, sitting out by the road in front of
our house. Now letters are less common because of two of the biggest
advancements man has made
—computers and the Internet, creating a communication system that allows the
transmission of messages almost instant- aneous, at the press of a key on a
computer. I am a genealogist, and it has been amazing to me to see this
development happen. I now communicate with people all over the world in seconds
and have made many family connections never thought possible.
Gradually, as phones became very common, it was a rare household that did not
have its own phone. As phone service was improved, we no longer had to go
through the operator, but could dial for ourselves. Beginning in the 1950s, we
could even dial long distance calls without having to go through an operator.
Phones have changed with the advancements in electronics. Phone numbers were
changed from two-digit to three, then four. Then area codes began to be used.
What does the 21st century hold for us? I’ve seen so much progress in my lifetime, almost 80 years, that it doesn’t seem as though there is anything left to be discovered, and yet, I know I sit
even now poised on the edge of exciting discoveries!
