Last night, as Cecile and I were watching TV, we began talking about how things had changed since we were kids in the '70's. Cecile asked if I had ever called the "Beepline". I had never heard of Beepline, but she explained that you would call a certain number, there would be a loud "beep". You would wait for a second ''beep" and there would be someone to talk to. Apparently, this was a glitch in Ma Bell's system and worked differently depending on where you lived. I googled "Beepline" and found that from the early 60's to the early 80's, Beepline served as an early chat room for teenagers. In some places, if you dialed a busy number, you could hear kids talking between the busy signals. Bob Greene described this in his book "Be True to Your School". I somehow missed this phenomenon.
The conversation then led to how phones had changed. When I was a kid, most phones were the rotary dial type. For you younger readers, a rotary dial phone had a wheel attached to the front of the phone with 10 holes around the edge, 1 thru 0 with the corresponding letters. To dial, you put your finger in the appropriate hole and turned the wheel counter-clockwise to the curved metal stop. You then released the wheel and it rotated back. It made a distinctive sound. ZIIIP! as you dialed the number and HMMMMMM! as it rotated back. You had to repeat this 7 times to dial a phone number. Some people had "touchtone" phones, with a button for each number. It seemed to be unbelieveably modern and spaceage. In the late 60's and early 70's phone numbers looked different too. This first 2 digits were called the "exchange" and was represented by a word. For instance, my phone number in 1970 was 529-2381, or Jackson 9-2381. this was most often abbreviated to JA9-2381. Cecile's family had a party line, where 2 to 3 families shared a phone line. Each family had a different "ring" and if you wanted to make a call, you picked up the reciever and listened to see if anyone was talking or if there was a dial tone. Most families had only one phone, and to get an extension was a big deal. I don't remember having a phone in my room until later in high school.
The phone conversation led to a conversation about television. As prehistoric as it might seem to someone under 30, there was a time when we only got 4 channels: 4,6,8 and 13. And channel 4 didn't come in very well! Sometimes if the reception was really poor, Dad would have to go outside and turn the TV antennae to improve the picture. Oh sorry youngsters, back up. A TV antennae was a metal grid attached to a pole on the side of the house that rose above the roofline to catch the TV signal. To change the channel on the TV, you didn't press a button on a remote, only "rich" people had remotes till well into the 70's. No, to change the channel, you got up off your rear, walked across the room to the TV and twisted the knob to the desired channel. Or you asked the closest child to do it for you. At my house, it worked something like this: "Todd, would you put the TV on Channel 8?" "But, Dad, I hate "60 Minutes" and "My Three Sons" will be on soon!"
"Just change the channel, Todd.......NOT SO FAST!!!! YOU'LL RUIN THE TUNER!!!"
Color TV wasn't all that common until the 70's either. Our first color TV was a 20" Magnavox on a rolling cart that Dad bought in 1971. 20" was a pretty big TV for the time. The biggest was a 25" console TV, but they were really expensive. About $400 at a time when the average family income was about $10,000 a year.
Cecile and I laughed about how each night was scheduled around favorite TV shows and if President Nixon was making a speech, you were screwed! I can still remember it clearly, sitting in the floor of the Den, wrapped in an afghan, an 8 ounce bottle of Coke and a bowl of popcorn beside me. Excuse me, I need to see if I can find a rerun of "My Three Sons" on one of my 400 channels.
