We all love to find a diary or letters written by great grandma or grandpa where they talk about their lives and share their memories. Think how excited one of your descendants will be to read about your memories and your stories! These stories will be lost after a few generations unless we preserve them. And what better way than in a weekly themed post.
This week's prompt is Telephones! That's right. Telephones and their use have changed greatly over the years. What kind of phone did you have in your home as a child? Did you have one phone in every room? Did you have to dial through the operator or did you have a rotary dial phone? Remember party lines? Maybe your family had one of those.
We had one rotary dial phone in our kitchen. We kids didn't use it to call friends and chat. If we wanted to get together with a friend, we walked to their house and knocked on their door. Phones were for serious things - emergencies for the most part.
Every Christmas my Grandmother would come to our home and my mom and dad would have a pre-arranged phone call to England so she could talk to her sister. Yep - pre-arranged. You couldn't just pick up the phone and dial England! You had to get the operator to set it all up ahead of time then you waited. The operator would ring you when your call was ready. I remember the excitement and anticipation of waiting in the living room while Grandma waited anxiously in the kitchen for the phone to ring. We all thought it was quite amazing that someone in Canada could talk to someone in England.
It's so different now isnt' it? Click open Skype on your computer and have a video call with someone anywhere in the world. Text or Vox user Voxer PPT pretty much anywhere in the world on your cell phone. I love technology!
I love it! We had an green rotary phone that hung in the kitchen. But, what I remember more is my aunt's phone. She lived out in the country and had 'party line'! When we picked up the phone, we would often hear other people talking and we'd hang it up and wait for later. If it was really important, my aunt would speak to them and ask if she could use the phone.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was a very young child, we lived in the city and had a private line, but my grandparents lived in the country and that was a different story. Their phone was on a wall where you had to turn a crank to call the operator who would connect you to whoever you were trying to call. That was a long time ago. But I can just remember the old phone and the way it would ring.
ReplyDeleteIn a bad storm the lightening would often knock the phone out and blow it off the wall. Glad those days are long past.