Read Online My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere by Susan Orlean - Free Book Online Page B

We’d never get to use the phone, because someone was always on it. Plus, the phone rang and rang and rang all the time, since you had ten families sharing it. We did get into counting the rings, though. You’d hear the phone and you’d stop and wait and count to see if it was for you. That was kind of fun.”
    “Did you know that in 1950 three-quarters of all the phone service in the United States was by party line?”
    “No,” Pat said.
    “Pat, can you hold on a minute? I’ve got a call on my other line.”
    “I suppose so.”
    “Okay, I’m back. Sorry. So you were saying it was hard to share the phone.”
    “Well, it was a pain. When we were on a ten-party line, you could hardly get a word in. And whenever we would pick up the phone to use it, there would already be someone on it. We would pick up the receiver and hear voices—”
    “I’m sorry, I have another call again. Can you hold for one second?”
    “I guess so.”
    “Okay, I’m back. So you were saying you’d pick up the phone and listen sometimes.”
    “Sure,” Pat said. “I wouldn’t listen a long time, just for a minute or so. But the same thing would happen to us. We’d be on a call and suddenly someone would pick it up and hang up a bunch of times, so there would be click-click-clicking the whole time you were on the phone. This one lady would listen for a long time before she’d hang up.”
    “Did people observe any kind of etiquette about party lines? Did they observe the Emily Post suggestion that if you share a party line and you have an emergency, you should pick up the phone and first say, ‘Emergency,’ in a loud voice and then say, ‘Our barn is on fire’?”
    “No, nothing special like that,” Pat said.
    “Did you know who any of the other people on your line were?”
    “We called once and tried to find out who they were, but the phone company wouldn’t tell us. We could tell that a lot of the families we shared the line with had teenagers. We were getting pretty disgusted, because they would never get off the phone. Sometimes we’d have to make an important call and they’d be on for ages, and finally we’d pick up the phone and say, ‘Can you please just get off for five minutes and let us make the call, and then you can have the phone back?’ And usually they’d say no. This one lady in particular, she would say,‘Well, I can’t get off. I’m in the middle of a long-distance call.’ ”
    “You said that the number of people on the line went from ten to four or five?”
    “In the sixties or seventies, we were down to sharing with just four other families. Then it was just two, and then finally just one. Now we have a party line, but we’re on it all by ourselves. Every once in a while, the phone company—it used to be Michigan Bell, but now it’s Ameritech, I think—the phone company calls us and says, ‘Well, guess what, we can give you a nice new line of your own,’ but we tell them we don’t want it! This is fine for us. And it’s cheap. We pay fifteen dollars a month and that’s it. We can’t have an answering machine or anything on it, for some reason, but that doesn’t really matter. The only problem we have isn’t with the party line; it’s with our phone. We have a rotary phone, and I don’t know what to do when you get these recordings saying, ‘Push this number, push that button.’ We don’t have any buttons. When I really need to use a Touch-Tone, I go to my mother’s. She’s ninety years old, but she has a Touch-Tone.”
    “How many phones do you have?”
    “Are you kidding? Just one.”
    This was when Jim got on.
    “I don’t really know why we got a phone to begin with,” he said. “I think Pat wanted one. I didn’t grow up with a telephone. The first time I ever used one was after I graduated from high school. I’m seventy-three, and I grew up without electricity or running water or even a refrigerator, and certainly without a phone.”
    “Do you use the phone