BAldwin 9-0860

Back in the ancient days of civilization, before the advent of cell phones (imagined only in the Dick Tracy comic strips where the police used wrist radios), before
they even had cordless phones, people had phones that plugged

into the wall. You still see such things in the homes of old people (ours, for instance) but they are becoming more and more rare.









Our home at 4056 N. Mariposa had such a phone and, when I say phone, the singular is intentional--there was one phone in the house: the classic black, rotary phone. It sat on
a divider between the kitchen and family room.










Since there was only a single phone in a semi-central location in most people's homes, common phone courtesy dictated that, when placing a call, you allowed the phone to ring 10 times before hanging up--allowing the called party time to make a mad dash from whatever remote part of the house they were in to the phone. No caller id in case you missed the call, just a a sense of dread that you had missed something important.

Our phone number was BAldwin 9-0860, later shortened to BA9-0860. While it eventually became 229-0860, I will always think of it as BAldwin 9-0860. Why BAldwin? I can only surmise that the phone company didn't believe people capable of remembering 7-digit numbers and I suspect there is ample evidence to support that notion. They thought it would be easier to remember numbers if they started with a word like Baldwin. The B and A were capitalized because those were the two letters that you were supposed to dial--in this case you dial 2 twice, once for the B and once for the A.

The first few years of BAldwin 9-0860 we had a party line. A party-line was a line that you shared with another customer (so not only did we only have one phone, in a sense we only had half a phone). Party lines were cheaper than private lines, so they were quite popular. We shared our line with our next door neighbors, the Dufers. If you wanted to make a call, you'd pick up the phone and, if you heard some one talking you gently returned the phone to it's receiver. If there was an emergency, you let the other person know that and they were, by law, required to let you use the line. I don't recall sharing a line with our neighbors to be a big deal but, then again, I was pretty young.

We got a private line in the early 60's when my dad was called to serve as Bishop. It was felt that a Bishop's conversations might be of such a nature that sharing a line was inappropriate. It was nice to be able to pick up the phone and make a call without having to worry about someone else using the line.

One last thing about phones and phone calls. Up until the early 1960's the only way to make a long distance call was to dial '0' and have the operator make the call for you. As you might imagine, this made long distance calling quite expensive, my recollection being that it cost $1.00 or more per minute in 1960's dollars. I'm guessing that would be $5.00 or more in 2014 dollars. When the phone rang and the operator came on with a long-distance call the world stopped for a moment because something of great import had occurred or was about to occur. We would all stand still and make no noise whatsoever because there was a LONG DISTANCE CALL.

As time went on there were additional long distance options. The original long distance service was person to person since no one wanted to make an expensive call only to find out that the person they needed to talk to wasn't there. Then came station to station that was cheaper and sufficient if it wasn't vital that you talked to a specific individual. Finally, when all the equipment was in place came direct dial long distance where you didn't need to involve the operator at all and was the cheapest available option and even then it was cheapest if you dialed on nights or weekends when demand was down. Now, of course,  we don't think twice about calling long distance from anywhere we happen to be.

Quiz:  What's the one question we ask when we make a call now that we never once asked when we made a call in the 1960's?