When we were sorting out the contents of my mother’s home, my eight- year- old grandson pointed to a small mahogany chair with a needlepoint seat cover and asked, “Gigi, why does that chair have a desk on the side instead of the front?” I realized that the “telephone chair” was as foreign to him as the black dial telephone it was designed to accompany.
“Time was,” I explained, “when we were bound to the six foot area near the wall where the phone jack was placed. We couldn’t multi task while on the phone. No cooking, driving, or throwing in a load of clothes.”
The phone chair was most often located in the living room where you were tethered to the telephone chair for as long as the conversation transpired. For teenagers, this could be a lengthy time, particularly if you had a boy friend who attended a different school.
The phone chair had a desk on one side with a shelf for phone books. We didn’t have numbers on speed dial, so after we dialed them daily over a period of years, they became forever imbedded in that computer prototype--the human brain. To this day, I can still repeat the seven digit numbers of my best friends. (We didn’t have area codes.) We never called our next door neighbors. Why call when we could open the door, walk out on the front or back porch and speak directly to them?
The little desk held not only the phone but the phone dialer, a plastic stick with a ball at the end that fit neatly into the dialing holes on the phone. These were a necessity for women who wanted to preserve their manicures (home manicures. I never knew anyone who had their nails done at a salon.) Usually there was a message holder—the fifties version of the answering machine—in our case a small wooden block, a wooden rod, and a clothespin attached, to hold important messages. Mine was a craft project from Girl Scouts, painted white with a pink plastic flower glued to the base—one of my more useful creations.
In the early fifties, we had a party phone. Unfortunately, we didn’t make the invitations to the party. Most often the other members on the line were eavesdroppers and phone hogs (according to my parents) who didn’t take the hint when you picked up the phone several times during their seemingly interminable conversations.
Every night like clockwork, we had calls from certain individuals—Aunt Ann, Uncle Bill, my mom’s best friend. They were taken right in the living room where everyone could hear at least one end of the conversation, unless it was drowned out by Bonanza or Dragnet. There was no such thing as a private call until I had a phone in my bedroom, which wasn’t until I was well into my teens. Even then you ran the risk of someone picking up the extension.
We didn’t have call waiting or beeps to indicate another incoming call. If a love struck teenager monopolized the family phone, the caller would get a busy signal—very annoying and apt to be reported to the adults in the family who, when the line was finally clear, were greeted with, “Who have you been talking to? I’ve been trying to call for an hour.”
If the phone rang during dinner, Dad would jump up from the table and run into the living room. There were no telemarketers. No one called during dinner unless it was an emergency because all of our friends and family knew that we ate precisely at five p.m., every night of the world and dinner was not to be interrupted.
A long distance call was a rarity, even in families where money wasn’t a major concern. When I drove back and forth to college in the early sixties, we had a system to let my parents know I had arrived safely—without incurring the extravagance of a long distance charge. The routine went like this:
I dialed zero.
Operator: “Can I help you?”
Me: “Yes I’d like to place a collect call to Madison IL.”
“What # are you calling?”
“876-7771”
“Your name?”
“Cyndi Zahm”
Ring Ring. Dad would pick up.
Operator: “You have a collect call from a Cindy Zahm. Will you accept the charges?”
Dad: “No, I’m just a workman. The family is out right now. (He didn’t want the operator to know he was a tightwad intent on beating the system.)
There is no longer a need for telephone chairs. Seldom do we sit to take a phone call. We can reach out and touch someone from the tub, the table, the traffic, and, alas, the toilet. Unfortunately, it works two ways. There is no escape.
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