Did Anyone Not Have One Of These In Their Kitchen's?

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Remember, no cordless phones meant people had to actually get up to answer the phone. Well unless they were sitting next to it as in a living room or bed room. Remember also Ma Bell used to charge dearly for those "extensions". It was very posh to have several extensions in one house. We only and two, kichen and the masterbed room (which was out of bounds for the children).

Privacy? Forget it on the kitchen phone, mother was usually in the kitchen and even though she was doing something else, just "knew" she was listening. *LOL* One would say something like, "wait, let me ask...", and before you could get the words out the answer came back "no". *LOL*

My parents only had to say "I'm On The Phone",and you knew to cut out whatever acting up one was doing. If that didn't work, there was always the finger snap and pointing towards a corner. That is where one went until the telephone conversation was over, then the real fun began! *LOL* To this day, hate wooden spoons! *LOL*x2*

Do not think rotary phones would work well with today's computer/internet lifestyle. My old Dell has various settings for "pulse/tone", but most modern computers, answer machines, faxes and so on assume everyone has tone service.

Launderess
 
Angus--your Conn. number...all those nines! Yikes! When got my first apartment, I was going to be all cool and retro and have only a rotary phone. Then my best friend moved out to LA and got a number that, with the exception of the 1-31, was all 8s, 9s, and 0s. I got a half broken touchtone trimline on clearance at walmart to use specifically to call her, and hide under the couch the rest of the time.

Launderess--from what manual did moms get the wooden spoon idea? They should reprint it! There was an article in the paper about this mother who discovered her 13 y.o. daughter's website and was stunned by its inappropriate content. She told her daughter she could no longer have the site, the daughter pitched a fit, the mother thought the daughter had a legitimate claim, so she relented, with some caveats. The mother drew up a contract, they both signed it, blah blah blah. Whatever happened to mothers saying NO! and following up with BECAUSE I SAID SO? Of course the child had her own computer, probably her own cell phone too. Children have waaay too much privacy these days, and so many parents THINK that they're "monitoring" things adequately, but in actuality have NO CLUE what their kids are up to.

WOW I sound like my own cranky about-to-retire-4th-grade-teacher mother!

T.
 
Children have waaay too much privacy these days,

There were no bedroom locks in the house I grew up in..... purposely.

Similarly we were not allowed to lock the bathroom door during showers...for safety...just in case.

BUT no one EVER entered a room without knocking and clearance.

There was ABSOLUTE respect for boundaries. I'd be in the shower and my sister on the throne (there was a dark shower curtain between) and there was NEVER the thought of peeking, teasing, harassing or invading one's most private moments.
 
Yeah my folks had a black one in the kitchen when I was a kid, and the desk version upstairs, and then we added another desk set downstairs so there was a place to make personal calls in reasonable privacy. (And then I started connecting up bootleg extensions all over the place and driving my folks mad...)

Western Electric type 554 C/D, later changed to 554 D/M, and then later to some other similar code when it went modular.

GE never made those, the Ebay listing is wrong.

Cadman, nice collection there. Some of those are not Western Electric. ITT and Stromberg-Carlson made the identical models under license; the color variations are subtle and there are some subtle manufacturing variations as well.

Your brown one is probably ITT, the bright red could be ITT or Stromberg-Carlson, the and bright orange is most likely Stromberg-Carlson, the yellow one next to it is also probably Stromberg-Carlson, but the darker red one at the far end is probably Western Electric.

BTW, you can use dial phones on modern exchanges. And you can even use rotary when you speak with those nasty voice-recognition menu systems, because they don't require touchtone (just think: that's the level of voice rec that NSA had maybe 20 years ago, now you can use it every time you try to call the electric co or the phone co or book an airline ticket...). The bells will still ring, and won't draw too much current (actually, maximum five ringing telephones on a typical residential line).

And best of all, it will still work in a power failure, while your cordless phone has gone dead because it depends on AC power. (However, in a lightning storm, your cordless will be safe to use because there are no wires to the handset to conduct a lightning strike. Even so, in lightning storms use the phone only in a life-or-death emergency.)

Last but not least:

For everyone here who has an old dial phone, the older the better, and a cellphone. Hook up your oldest old dial phone and call a friend and ask them how you sound and then talk for a few minutes. Then call them on your cellphone and ask them how you sound and talk for a few minutes.

The old dial phones sound better EVERY time.

I do that one routinely on one of my 50- to 70-year-old English dialphones which is hooked up at my desk (for example GPO types 332 and 164 respectively). "Yeah you sound fine, why..." followed shortly by "...How old did you say that was??!!"
 
There's definitely no comparison between the old phone company phones and the new stuff for voice quality. Small handsets are a big contributor to it on many since the mike doesn't even come close to the speakes mouth but even that isn't guarantee.
 
Oh man that's crazy! My grandparents have that exact phone in ivory color! it came with their house in racine, wi when they built it in 1970.
 
Petek: Small handsets are a pet peeve of mine. And earpieces that are practically designed to get dirty and be impossible to clean. And touchtone buttons, especially on cellphones, that are too small for human fingers. The people designing this stuff nowadays should be forced to use it and then maybe they'll get a clue.

IMHO the most ergonomically correct handsets in the world are, in this order, Automatic Electric 810 and 81, Western Electric G3 and K types (the latter still being made, e.g. on Panasonic digital office telephones), and the GPO (UK) type that first came in with the 706 telephones (I should know the part number for that but it escapes me at the moment...).

The most ergonomic touchtone dial was found on the GPO 8200 series "Ambassador" phones, followed by Western Electric 35-sereies (e.g. 35-YA3 and suchlike).

The most ergonomic rotary dials were the GPO trigger and slipping cam types, followed by Automatic Electric types 51 and 24, followed by Western Electric #7 with the metal fingerwheel.
 
I was reading an article a few weeks back about cellphone makers starting to come back with basic models to entice older users who aren't as enamored with all the gee-whiz and miniaturization of new cell phones. Less features, bigger buttons etc. I always liked the standard WE phone keypads at work where I did a lot of calling because I never even had to glance at the phone. Just reach over, cup my hand over the buttons and start dialing. Then we went to a Northstar system with lighter touch buttons, slightly smaller and while I could still do it I would make mistakes more often.
I find for myself, maybe others do as well, that there are many phones numbers I couldn't actually recite, especially at work, but they were so ingrained in my brain from constant dialling that I remember the keystroke pattern and not the actual number and so never had to look them up.
 
Pete--I know what you mean about keystroke patterns. A good part of my job is transferring calls. I'm amazed at how my fingers fairly dance over the Transfer and number keys--I don't even have to take my eyes off the Discuss-O-Mat. ;)

I have a Nortel Meridian with an add-on unit. The buttons ARE a bit small and close together. My add-on unit used to have a line key for every station in our building, which was very useful. It saved a lot of running down halls for people ("Is that my phone ringing--could you get it?"). I could also set up calls for the less inept. Now that the university has switched from a Centrex system to having our own switch on campus, what used to be line keys are just speed dial buttons with BLFs--much less useful, and now the big impressive-looking phone seems more like a big waste of space. I can't believe that a shiny new Nortel digital switch couldn't accomodate my previous setup, but that's what they tell me.

Our local carrier here in Southern IL was GTE, now Verizon, so all the resale shop/garage sale telephones are AE. I know that AE phones were superior to WE phones in many technical ways, but to a kid who grew up in Illinois Bell territory, they're just a little odd looking...and the Starlite phone is just plain WEIRD.

T.
 
The Northstar Meridian system was a great phone system for small to medium businesses. Lots of flexibility and user friendly. Nice too that it allows each individual some leeway into how they want their own set to function. The sets themselves aren't all that sturdy but not too bad. My partner and I bought a system second hand years ago for his business and it's been trouble free. We also had it one of the offices I worked in and when we moved offices the company went with the phone companies centrex and we lost all that flexibility and control.
I was reading an interesting article on Western Electric and the Bell System. It seemed that part of Westerns demise starting back in the 60's and early 70's was that they were short sighted believing that digital switches would never amount to anything whereas the newly divorced Northern Electric in Canada, all having at one time been tied up in Bell, took digital research and technology seriously and that's how they essentially became the dominant player in digital telephony. The Northstar Meridian was designed and manufactured by Nortel, the new name for Northern Electric once they disenfranchised themselves from Bell.
 
Does anyone remember the "TouchTone Song Book"? About 1970...You could play "Mary had a little lamb," "O Come All Ye Faithful" and other tunes using the 12 pads. I wonder how many overseas calls I made trying to master that book...! No wonder I was always on phone restriction!

Happy Easter!
 
LOL.

My mother and sister live just outside of a place called Flushing, Queens (yes just like *The Nanny*) that is now 100% Asian of the far-eastern variety.

Every time my nieces were playing with the phone...and there would be Chinese language on the other end....they were scared to death that it was the far-away China rather than the local one.

*LOL*
 
...a commercial in there for Bell telephones a housewife is

I have that on a video series I got as a gift for Christmas about 10 years ago. A woman is standing in her newly remodeled kitchen (with turquoise appliances) singing over her red wall phone to her friend about "...a new refrigerator and a phone, a kitchen phone, a bright red phone...."

Our house (my parents are still there) was the model for our subdivision in the fall of '65 and the phone was there when we moved in. It was an avocado green rotary wall model with the standard length cord -- 6 feet I think. Our phone company was an independent and the phone equipment was Stromberg-Carlson (and ITT in the late 70s/early 80s). Many people who had lived in the town for a number of years had the older art deco Stromberg-Carlsons, which at the time I thought were the most hideous things I had ever seen.

For YEARS, that green phone was our only phone -- in the kitchen, naturally. By the time I was a young teenager and after much begging, my parents finally relented and got an extension in their bedroom if I agreed to pay for it. This was around 1975 or so. The phone company charged $2.50 for installation, a one-time $8.50 "color charge" for anything other than black, and an additional $1.00 per month on the bill for the "extension," unless you got a Trimline (known as a "Slenderet" to Stromberg-Carlson) and that dollar increased to $2.50 per month. Our phone company didn't want to be bothered with the transformer to make the dial light up so the few people in our town who splurged for Trimlines couldn't dial in the dark.

They didn't offer the Stromberg-Carlson Cinderella (Princess clone) but we could get the Ericofon. That's what I got for my parents' room in '75, in Aqua Mist IIRC. You didn't have to pay a color charge for the Ericofon since it didn't ring and couldn't be used as your primary phone. This worked out well because my dad worked rotating shifts and was often asleep and a ringing phone in the bedroom would have put him in a worse mood than what he was usually already in.

Around 1978 or so when I was in the 10th grade and lived on the phone, my parents agreed to let me get my own line. I think some of the Bell companies had Call Waiting at that time but our little phone company did not. As a matter of fact, I was their first residential customer to have Touch-Tone. Mine was the standard 2500 desk set in the blinding orange that I thought was so cool at the time. It was not modular, though. I had both a 25 foot line cord and handset cord so I could take that phone anywhere.

My parents absolutely would not pay the $15 or so to get their phones swapped to Touch-Tone. (I think it also increased the monthly bill by $1.50 or so.) So I did it for them as a Christmas gift in 1980 and had the additional charge added to my phone bill. The green wall phone in the kitchen was a replaced with a dark brown (to match the Coppertone Norge kitchen appliances, you know) Touch-Tone wall model. This was some type of hybrid that you never saw in a Western Electric customer's home. Instead of the small base that the Western Electric models had, this phone was the exact same size as a rotary wall phone but the rotary dial pad was replaced with a round Touch-Tone pad. I had a blue Touch-Tone Slenderet replace the Ericofon in my parents' bedroom and a friend of my dad's who worked for South Central Bell gave me a transformer so the buttons would light.

Sorry to ramble; this does bring back a lot of memories. Especially of what a little weirdo I was. Only people on this site will understand. The town I grew up in was VERY small (population less than 1,000) and whenever someone new moved there, I couldn't wait to get inside their house to see what kind and color were their appliances, whether they were cheap and didn't spend the additional $8.50 to get something other than a black phone (most did not) and if so, what color and how many.

The good old days....
 
Great story Mark. My folks wouldn't pay any of the added charges either for an extension etc at our house. However one day when I was maybe 12ish I was over at a friends place and he showed me their "illegal" model 302 set hidden in the laundry room. His mom happpened to teach at the same school as my mother and that's where she had gotten the old set. Donations for the kids to play with. So naturally I asked my mom if they had anymore laying around the school and to get me one, which she did but I wasn't supposed to hook it up in case they got caught lol. Naturally I hooked it up.
 
I thought that you all might get a kick out of this....

Ma Bell's Officially Recommended Exchange Names

The following is a list of recommended names for dialable/quotable telephone EXchange names. It comes from AT&T/Bell's publication "Notes on Nationwide Dialing, 1955". Many cities with EXchange names had for decades been using names which are not from this list, and they were not necessarily required to change the names. These names were supposed to have been chosen such that pronouncing the name should easily identify the first two significant dialable letters of the word, as well as quoting the two letters themselves wasn't supposed to be confused with other 'like-sounding' letters which were associated with different numbers on the dial. Since this list was Ma Bell's official recommendation, it covered the entire Bell system. If you do not have a historically accurate exchange name to use for your current telephone number, you should choose one from this list.
To help foster the use of exchange names, send this list everywhere, or print out copies and hand them out on streetcorners!

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

22 ACademy BAldwin CApital CAstle
23 ADams BElmont BEverly CEdar CEnter CEntral
24 CHapel CHerry CHestnut CHurchill CIrcle
25 ALpine BLackburn CLearbrook CLearwater CLifford CLinton
26 AMherst ANdrew COlfax COlony COngress
27 BRidgeBRoad(way) BRown(ing) CRestview CRestwood
28 ATlantic ATlas ATwater ATwood AVenue BUtler
29 AXminster AXtel CYpress

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

32 DAvenport DAvis EAst(gate) FAculty FAirfax FAirview
33 DEerfield DEwey EDgewater EDgewood EDison FEderal
34 DIamond DIckens FIeldbrook FIeldstone FIllmore FIrestone
35 ELgin ELliot ELmwood FLanders FLeetwood
36 EMerson EMpire ENdicott FOrest FOxcroft
37 DRake DRexel ESsex FRanklin FRontier
38 DUdley DUnkirk DUpont EVergreen FUlton
39 EXbrook EXeter EXport EXpress

42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

42 GArden GArfield HAmilton HArrison HAzel
43 GEneral GEneva HEmlock HEmpstead IDlewood
44 GIbson GIlbert HIckman HIckory HIllcrest HIlltop
45 GLadstone GLencourt GLendale GLenview GLobe
46 HObart HOmestead HOpkins HOward INgersoll
47 GRanite GReenwood GReenfield GReenleaf GRover GRidley
48 HUbbard HUdson HUnter HUntley HUxley IVanhoe
49 GYpsy HYacinth HYatt

52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

52 JAckson LAfayette LAkeside LAkeview LAmbert LAwrence
53 JEfferson KEllogg KEystone LEhigh LEnox
54 KImball KIngsdale KIngswood LIberty LIncoln LInden
55 (In 1955, this was reserved for radio telephone numbers)
56 JOhn JOrdan LOcust LOgan LOwell
57 (In 1955, this was reserved for radio telephone numbers)
58 JUniper JUno JUstice LUdlow LUther
59 LYceum LYndhurst LYnwood LYric

62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

62 MAdison MAin MArket MAyfair NAtional
63 MEdford MElrose MErcury NEptune NEwton NEwtown
64 MIdway MIlton MIssion MItchell NIagara
65 OLdfield OLive OLiver OLympia OLympic
66 MOhawk MOntrose MOrris NOrmandy NOrth(field)
67 ORange ORchard ORiole ORleans OSborne
68 MUrdock MUrray MUseum MUtual OVerbrook OVerland
69 MYrtle OWen OXbow OXford

72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

72 PAlace PArk(view) PArk(way) RAndolph RAymond SAratoga
73 PErshing REd(field) REd(wood) REgent REpublic
74 PIlgrim PIoneer RIver(side) RIver(view) SHadyside SHerwood
75 PLateau PLaza PLeasant PLymouth SKyline
76 POplar POrter ROckwell ROger(s) SOuth(field)
77 PRescott PResident PRospect SPring SPruce
78 STate STerling STillwell STory SUnset
79 PYramid SWathmore SWift SWinburne SYcamore

82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89

82 TAlbot TAlmadge TAylor VAlley VAndyke
83 TEmple TEnnyson TErminal TErrace VErnon
84 THornwell TIlden VIctor(ia) VIking VInewood
85 ULrick ULster ULysses
86 TOwnsend UNderhill UNion UNiversity VOlunteer
87 TRemont TRiangle TRinity TRojan UPtown
88 TUcker TUlip TUrner TUxedo
89 TWilight TWinbrook TWinoaks TWining

92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99

92 WAbash WAlker WAlnut WArwick WAverly
93 WEbster WElls WEllington WEst(more) YEllowstone
94 WHitehall WHitney WIlliam(s) WIlson WIndsor
95 (In 1955, this was reserved for radio telephone numbers)
96 WOodland WOodlawn WOodward WOrth YOrktown
97 (In 1955, this was reserved for radio telephone numbers)
98 YUkon
99 WYandotte WYndown WYman
 
To make an illegal extension invisible all you had to do was

Disconnect the ringer....the phone company could tell how many phones you had by ringing your # and checking how many amps your line drew but if you disconnected the ringer the phone did not draw any amps ergo it then became invisible to the phone company. My dad did that with a phone that the phone company left behind at one of his apartments....when they did not come back and get the phone after installing a new one (my dad called and reminded them that they forgot and yet they still did not come) so the phone followed him and mom to there new house in Springfield in 1963 and then to our house in Vienna in 1976. I got a hold of the phone in the mid 90's and had it restored so it would ring and it is one of my most favorite phones in my collection to this day.
 
We lived on the farm in the 50s' and had a wall phone that you had to crank to summond "Central, your number please" Gladys Erickson lived down and across the mile and was always on the phone it seemed. We had a 7 party line i think it was and could listen in on everyone. Mom would place her right hand over the mouth piece and listen in with the hand receiver with her left. I would get my brother and we would would scream so she would have to hang up. She would so loveingly say. "Gary,I am going to beat your A-- if you don't stop that!" Oh, the fond and harmoneous memories of childhood, who's parents were deeply concerned for your self-esteem and self-respect. Who didn't buy you everything that you wanted and who told you NO quite often. Where are those parents now? Off to the councelor's office now. Gary
 

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