Yesterday a friend sent me the story that has made the rounds a few times about the young boy who called the information operator on the old crank phone to get answers for all sorts of things and they get to be friends. You probably know the one.
It started me reminiscing about the old crank phone that we had. It was a party line, two sided, 28 families on it and that meant that 14 other people’s phones were ringing into your house – and 14 other families could listen to your conversations.
Our ring was two “longs” and one “short”. It was quite an event to get a phone call in those days since people didn’t usually phone just to chat – it had to be something important. So for the gossips in the community telephone conversations were a great source of information.
I remember a time when one of the women in the community got the recipe for a really fancy cake along with extensive decorating instructions from her relative in a big city. She was determined to win the cake-baking competition at the local church’s Strawberry Social.
You have to try and understand that in those days, when the only validation or respect a woman got was for her competence as a wife and mother, winning something like this was a really BIG DEAL. It gave you a considerable amount of status, especially in a small community.
Well, you can guess what happened. Another woman who was on the same party line entered exactly the same cake in the competition. It was vicious! By the time I left there for the big city the second generation of women still wasn’t speaking to each other, and the men didn’t dare if the women were around.
The only time I ever heard my mother take the Lord’s name in vain was during a telephone conversation she was having with her mother who lived quite a long way away. Someone with a cold kept sniffing and sniffing. Well, sniffing had always been something my mother couldn’t stand, just as she couldn’t stand Nosy Parkers, and she finally, in exasperation hollered “For God’s sake go and blow your nose! We won’t say anything until you get back.”
It’s odd, you know. In those days we would have given anything for some privacy during a telephone conversation. Now everyone strolls around with their cell phones spouting their business and foolishness at the top of their voices so everyone they pass has to hear it whether they want to or not. I truly can’t figure out whether it’s ego, thinking that their business is so fascinating that everyone else is just dying to hear it, or just plain rudeness and not caring how much they disturb other people who have to use the same streets and buses.
Of course the other major invasion of privacy in those days was at the local country the post office. Our post office, such as it was, was little mail boxes in the egg-candling shed of a local farmer. He would ‘candle’ the mail as he sorted it, so always knew your business before you did, and he’d likely told half the community by then too.
I really still don’t understand how news gets around so fast in the country. I experienced it when I was in another country and went way up in the hills where houses were few and far between, there were no telephones, and most everyone was out somewhere far from the road (I never saw anyone) in the fields working. I stopped at a small lean-to that served as the local store and had rice and oil and other basic necessities. I wasn’t there half an hour before people started showing up, having heard there was a tourist there. It’s truly amazing how news gets passed on.
