Communications

 How many of you remember picking up the phone and hearing the operator ask, “number please?”   Usually this was on a party line and sometimes you could hear the neighbor talking and had to wait for them to hang up before getting your call connected.   If the neighbor tied up the line too long sometimes mom had to interrupt and tell Mabelle down the road to stop hogging the line with her gossiping.    By the late 1950’s they came out with the rotary dial phones on private lines and there was no more dealing with the neighbors.  

My first summer job with the Forest Service in 1969 was at the Hilton Spike Camp Guard Station on the Modoc National Forest.    One of our first duties was maintaining the phone line between the guard station and Manzanita Lookout.  It took a few days to clear the fallen branches and trees from the line and splice it where it had been broken.   This line connected two phones that had to be cranked in order to make it ring at the other end.   The lady on the lookout used it whenever she needed us to bring her a load of water or haul her garbage off.   It was used once to report a lightning fire to us since it was after office hours and she was unable to call the dispatcher from her two-way radio.   The problem with this system was not hearing it ring when nobody was near the phone.  The two-way radio system was more reliable, but everybody could hear you all over the Forest depending on your location.    At nights the lookouts could talk to each other over the radio on a social level.  This reminds me of a story a lookout on Hammerhorn Mountain told us when a friend and I spent a night there in 1962 while backpacking through the Yolla Bolly Wilderness on the Mendocino National Forest.   He told us a recently young married couple were the lookouts on a peak to the south of his location, I think called Black Butte.   He said they had left the base set radio transmitter lever on and during the night many of the other Forest lookouts could hear the heated commotion after the lights went out.  

Sometime in the 1990’s cell phones came into use.   Through my credit union in Springfield I got my first analog cell phone in 1997 for free from Verizon with a monthly cost of $20.   When everything went digital they informed my phone had to be replaced and they sent me a Motorola phone, again for free and still $20 a month.   I believe this was in 1999, not sure, but I still have this phone with the original battery.  Took a while to learn how to use it and never fully understood all the functions available on it.    A few years ago I took the phone into the Verizon shop in Roseburg where the people there had never seen one this old.    They checked it out and got it programed for caller ID, call waiting and showed me it could receive and send text messages.   They tried to sell me a new smart phone where my monthly bill would be increased to pay for it over time.   I declined in fear of never learning all its functions and besides my old Motorola could do all the basic things I needed.    When we had our land line phone disconnected four or five years ago we got a second cell phone for Celia.  It is the flip type phone and more complicated to use than my phone.    Our monthly rate for the two phones is $54 with a limit of 700 hours.   Our old land line phone was about the same amount per month and did not include long distant calls.    Now we never leave home without our cell phones.  

How did we ever survive in our younger days riding our bikes down country roads, getting flat tires, crashing into the ditch and getting bruised knees with no way to call mom?