Read Online My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere by Susan Orlean - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Susan Orlean
Tags: Fiction
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Supreme Queen got a trophy that was taller than any of the children at the pageant. Someone called out, “Honey, if you live in a trailer, you’re in trouble! You won’t be able to get that into your home!”
I went back to Alabama a few weeks later to see Nina in another pageant. This one was also at the Prattville Holiday Inn. The pageant was called Li’l American Beauty, and the trophies and the crowns and the backdrop were different, but the feeling in the air was the same. I recognized some of the kids from Southern Charm. There were only about a dozen girls, so the judging went fast, and just as at the first pageant, I could hardly bear to watch the crowning. Kris Ragsdale stood up there with Nina, who was asleep, her bow sliding out of her hair. The other mothers were also lined up with their babies, shifting them around in their arms like bags of groceries, and they had a little tightness in their faces as they waited to hear what the judges had to say. Most of the babies had curled up and were lost in the folds of their puffy dresses, and suddenly all I could really see were the mothers, wearing their plain outfits and their plain makeup, their husbands and parents standing a few feet away, ready to take the picture they were all waiting for, of their beautiful daughters being crowned.
Party Line
If you’re one of those people who have three phone lines at home, plus a pager, plus a CDMA trimode cellphone with a Web browser and SMS, and you still want to upgrade your telecommunications system, you should meet Pat and Jim Bannick. Better yet, you should give them a call. Chances are they won’t be on the phone.
“We’re not really phone people,” Pat said when I called her the other day at her home in Dimondale, Michigan. “By the way, I couldn’t believe Jim answered when you called. He never answers the phone. Once, I bought him one of those nice phones that you can walk around with—”
“A cellphone?”
“Yes, I think that’s it. The kind so you don’t need a long cord on it?”
“Oh, you mean a cordless phone?”
“That’s right. The kind without a cord. Anyway, a while ago I got Jim one of those, but he wouldn’t even look at it, so I ended up returning it.”
The Bannicks are among the last people in the state of Michigan, and possibly in the entire known universe, who still have their telephone service on a party line. A party line is not a current telecommunications option. SBC Ameritech, the Bannicks’ phone company, has only a handful of them left, all of them in Michigan. (The Nevada division took its last party line out of service in 2001; the Southwestern Bell division shut down its last one in 1996; and Pacific Bell took all but one of its party lines out of service in 1997.)
Party lines are not to be confused with chat lines, party planners, or escort services: They are a prehistoric phone technology of copper-loop circuits that can be shared by as many as twenty telephones in separate locations, predating by several decades such advancements as three-way conferencing and the quack-ringing Mallard Duck Phone. On a typical party line, all the phones in all the houses sharing the line have the same phone number, and all the phones in all the houses ring whenever a call comes in for any one of them. Each household would be assigned a distinctive ring, so you could tell if the bell was tolling for you or for another one of the houses on your line. “Ours was a three-ringer,” Pat said. “Or was it first a two-ringer? No, I think it was a three-ringer, and then we were a two-ringer.”
“What year did you get your phone?”
“It was 1955,” Pat said. “It was the year that we built the house.”
“In 1955? That was the year Mary L. Kayes, of Dutchess County, New York, was convicted of refusing to yield her party line to someone wanting to report a fire.”
“My goodness.”
“What was it like sharing a phone?”
“Well, honestly, it was awful.
I went back to Alabama a few weeks later to see Nina in another pageant. This one was also at the Prattville Holiday Inn. The pageant was called Li’l American Beauty, and the trophies and the crowns and the backdrop were different, but the feeling in the air was the same. I recognized some of the kids from Southern Charm. There were only about a dozen girls, so the judging went fast, and just as at the first pageant, I could hardly bear to watch the crowning. Kris Ragsdale stood up there with Nina, who was asleep, her bow sliding out of her hair. The other mothers were also lined up with their babies, shifting them around in their arms like bags of groceries, and they had a little tightness in their faces as they waited to hear what the judges had to say. Most of the babies had curled up and were lost in the folds of their puffy dresses, and suddenly all I could really see were the mothers, wearing their plain outfits and their plain makeup, their husbands and parents standing a few feet away, ready to take the picture they were all waiting for, of their beautiful daughters being crowned.
Party Line
If you’re one of those people who have three phone lines at home, plus a pager, plus a CDMA trimode cellphone with a Web browser and SMS, and you still want to upgrade your telecommunications system, you should meet Pat and Jim Bannick. Better yet, you should give them a call. Chances are they won’t be on the phone.
“We’re not really phone people,” Pat said when I called her the other day at her home in Dimondale, Michigan. “By the way, I couldn’t believe Jim answered when you called. He never answers the phone. Once, I bought him one of those nice phones that you can walk around with—”
“A cellphone?”
“Yes, I think that’s it. The kind so you don’t need a long cord on it?”
“Oh, you mean a cordless phone?”
“That’s right. The kind without a cord. Anyway, a while ago I got Jim one of those, but he wouldn’t even look at it, so I ended up returning it.”
The Bannicks are among the last people in the state of Michigan, and possibly in the entire known universe, who still have their telephone service on a party line. A party line is not a current telecommunications option. SBC Ameritech, the Bannicks’ phone company, has only a handful of them left, all of them in Michigan. (The Nevada division took its last party line out of service in 2001; the Southwestern Bell division shut down its last one in 1996; and Pacific Bell took all but one of its party lines out of service in 1997.)
Party lines are not to be confused with chat lines, party planners, or escort services: They are a prehistoric phone technology of copper-loop circuits that can be shared by as many as twenty telephones in separate locations, predating by several decades such advancements as three-way conferencing and the quack-ringing Mallard Duck Phone. On a typical party line, all the phones in all the houses sharing the line have the same phone number, and all the phones in all the houses ring whenever a call comes in for any one of them. Each household would be assigned a distinctive ring, so you could tell if the bell was tolling for you or for another one of the houses on your line. “Ours was a three-ringer,” Pat said. “Or was it first a two-ringer? No, I think it was a three-ringer, and then we were a two-ringer.”
“What year did you get your phone?”
“It was 1955,” Pat said. “It was the year that we built the house.”
“In 1955? That was the year Mary L. Kayes, of Dutchess County, New York, was convicted of refusing to yield her party line to someone wanting to report a fire.”
“My goodness.”
“What was it like sharing a phone?”
“Well, honestly, it was awful.
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