Hold the phone!

“Hello, have I reached the party to whom I am speaking?” – Lily Tomlin’s character Ernestine, the phone operator.

Like my transistor radio tucked under my pillow at night or the metal rabbit ears sprouting from the top of our Zenith TV, landlines will soon become a thing of the past if AT&T has its way. Oh, well. Even a septuagenarian like me hasn’t used one in years.

Still, it’s one more mainstay of my youth heading down the off ramp. Though I may have forgotten to pick up lettuce at the grocery store this morning, I can still recall our family’s long-ago phone number.

REliance 5-3074. Or RE 5-3074 for short.

In yesteryear, our phone numbers began with an exchange, shortened to the first two letters, followed by five numbers. In Chicago, there were a slew of exchanges, including LUdlow, RAvenswood, and HUdson. (Chicago people, are you intoning Hudson 3-2700 right now, in your baritone voice? I thought so. It’s Boushelle Carpet Cleaners, in case you’ve forgotten.)

Our one-and-only phone, a black Bakelite with a rotary dial, sat on my mother’s sewing machine console on a little divider wall next to a coat closet at the edge of our living room. Privacy was nonexistent. On Saturday morning, rehashing the details of Friday night’s sock hop with my friend Mary Anne, I’d crawl into the closet, straining the phone cord to its skimpy limit, speaking in hushed tones, while my dad read the Tribune, sitting in his La-Z-Boy just a few feet away. Was he listening? Did he care if Paul did or did not ask Mary Anne to dance? Maybe not. But to be safe, I kept my gushing to a minimum and saved the details for notes we girls passed to one another when we got to school on Monday morning.

Sometime during high school, we upgraded to two phones – a harvest gold wall mount in the kitchen, complete with a long twisty cord. The old black ten-pounder ended up on my parents’ dresser, where one could shut the door and speak undisturbed by four younger siblings – at least for five minutes or so.

Funny to think that there was one phone number per family, adding to the telephone melodrama.  Was he trying to call me but just kept getting the brrr—brrr—brrr of a busy signal? Would Mom ever hang up, or would she keep talking to Grandma about Mrs. Shleich’s funeral all night long? It was never wise to give the “cut it short” signal to my mother, and my little sister only stuck out her tongue if I tried it with her. Excruciating!

And without caller id, it was anybody’s guess who was getting a call. When the phone rang, shouts of “I’ll get it!” burst from every corner of our little house as we kids dashed to answer it, then waited impatiently while the first one on the scene handed off the receiver with an “It’s for you.”

If perchance it was for me, just who was calling? Was it Mr. Right? Mostly it was my friend Barbara nattering on about Sister Rose Augusta’s math homework, or the mom down the street, wondering if I could babysit.

Phone-calling wasn’t easy for teen boys either. If they mustered up the courage to call the girl of their dreams, they also had to consider who might answer the phone. The dad? The mom? The big brother? I wonder if, like in Bye Bye Birdie, guys practiced their script before their index finger made its way around the dial.

“Hello, Mister Henkel, this is Harvey Johnson. Can I speak to Penelope Ann?”

Still, the lack of caller ID did have its advantages. At pajama parties hilarity ensued when  we’d randomly select a name from the thick-as-a-cinder-block Chicago phone book and make prank calls. Or we’d call Walgreens.

“Do you have Prince Albert in a can?”

“Yes.”

“Then you should let him out!”

Nyuk-nyuk-nyuk!

In a landline-only world, teen girls hesitated to step away from the house. What if HE called and you weren’t there? Would HE call back? Your “answering machine” was your unreliable little brother who rarely bothered to take a message, or would report, “Some guy called. How should I know who it was! Sounded like a weirdo.”

In college, getting a phone call was even trickier. A caller would call the dorm switchboard. Then the girl at the desk paged you in your room. “Ellen, you have a call. Second floor.” You’d dash to the hall phone, and she’d connect you. But you’d better make it short. Every minute you were on the phone prevented another girl from getting her phone call. When I transferred in my junior year, the wall phone my roommate and I shared was the height of extravagance.

And long-distance calls – nope. The other day, I spoke to my Arizona sister for nearly an hour in the middle of the day. Why? Just to catch up. This would have been unheard of for my mother and her sister Lizzie, far away in Massachusetts. If Aunt Lizzie called, it was either Christmas Day or when someone died. Idle chitchat cost too much money, so they relied on handwritten letters mailed every few weeks. When I was away at college, I seldom called my parents. They seldom called me. And friends at other colleges? We wrote letters – witty, angsty, whiny, silly — and much of my spending money went for cute stationery and five-cent stamps.

When my then-boyfriend-now-husband spent the summer before our wedding working in Iowa, it was letters, not phone calls, that kept us connected. Calling would have been nice, but the phone bill!  Still, I have those long-ago letters in a box in our basement, a sweet reminder of those days.  

Simple problems now solved with cell phones weren’t solved at all. Running late? Lost? Stuck somewhere with a flat tire? Find a pay phone, hope you have a dime, or just stay incommunicado.

Technology sure has changed, and now we’re enveloped in a cacophony of cell phones chiming, chirping, blaring, bellowing—the soundtrack of our lives.

What hasn’t changed, though, is our need to be connected to one another. When that little ditty plays on my cell phone, it’s not unlike the words a sibling would utter when handing me the receiver:

“It’s for you.”

And unless I see that the call is from Spam Likely, I’m mostly happy to say Hello.