Try explaining this to your 13-year-old: "When mom and dad were kids, it was against the law to own a telephone." I think this is harder than trying to explain what "records" were or how cool it was to smell those blue-inked class handouts fresh from the ditto machine.
I'm guessing the average four-person family in Fairfield County today owns about 12 telephones think I'm overestimating? Do the math. Each person over the age of about seven has at least one working cellphone and one old cellphone sitting in a drawer someplace, "just in case." That's eight right there.
Then there is a phone in the kitchen, one in mom and dad's bedroom and one in the family room, plus at least one more set from before the last upgrade. That's 12 telephones, minimum, friends and neighbors.
How many phones did the average home own in 1976? Zero. Nada. None. Zilch. Oh, we had phones, of course probably one in the kitchen, mom and dad's bedroom, big sister's bedroom, the family room and maybe even one in dad's shop or in a pool house or something. But they were all rented from good ol' Ma Bell.
The only people who had phones and weren't paying rent on them to the Bell System every month were those underground scofflaws who, gasp, didn't turn in their phone when they moved and then snuck it onto their new phone line by splicing it in late one night with all the shades drawn, their work lit by a single candle.
But they would get caught eventually -- you knew they would. Ma Bell would find you if you kept the bell connected on that illegal phone because they could tell how many phones you had on the line by how much current was drawn when the phones rang. Three phones worth of current and you were only paying for two? Ding Dong -- phone police!
Smart enough to disconnect the bell? If you ever needed a phone repaired, you had to have Ma Bell's technician (otherwise known as "the phone repair guy") come into your house where he would just take a moment to "inspect the wiring," and find your little do-it-yourself project. Busted.
And why was Ma so dead set against us owning such a dangerous device? Officially, it was to maintain (drum roll, please) "the integrity of the network." The theory was that putting any phone onto their system that they did not personally -- and with loving care (and wide profit margins) -- build, maintain and bury with full military honors at the end of its useful life could cause the whole thing to tumble to the ground, bringing the business of the nation to a standstill. This was met with either unblinking belief or the kind of skepticism that today greets the whole "you can't use cellphones on an airplane because it will cause it to crash" thing.
So we didn't own telephones. We just paid whatever the phone company wanted every month, forever. In 1976, my grandparents still had the phone they got brand spankin' new -- in 1948. Weighed about 11 pounds and worked like a charm. Those phones could be used as murder weapons (and were with some success). Try doing that with your Blackberry.
Kurt Ringquist is the author of numerous scraps of doggerel, superfluous information and questionable prose. His work has appeared in Kansas Quarterly as well as at the bottom of birdcages in and around Fairfield County. He is the former publisher of the LW Flyer, a satirical newspaper with as many as seven readers, all coincidentally named "Ringquist." Comments and questions may be directed to Kurt at [email protected].
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