What a wonderful thread, so many memories. When I went away to college, one of my friends was lucky enough to live off campus. This was in a small town outside of Allentown, PA. It had the only independent telephone company between NY and Philly. Family owned and they refused to sell out to Bell. When the phone was hooked up, they receive a candlestick phone. They were still using them as standard equipment. The pay phones were Northern Electric. After the party you called answered you had to get all of your coins in before they hung up. They couldn't hear you until all the coins were in. I don't know how many times I heard "Hello? Hello? Hello-ooo, click. And then you lost all the coins you put in.
After college I moved to my husbands neck of the woods. We ended up outside of Cleveland, OH. The Ohio Bell line stopped a few houses away. We had The Western Reserve Telephone Company who were rushing technologically headlong into the 1960's. Calling Cleveland was a trip. You could hear the relay going cachunk, cachunk, cachunk all the way down the trunk line into Hudson, OH. Then the touchtone beeps after you got into the Bell lines, then the ring. Calling a next door neighbor took twice as long, cachunking into Hudson, cachunking back to our exchange, then a ring. We got touchtone service sometime around 1990.
We also owned a former Ohio Bell truck for awhile. It was one of the wide eyed flat front Dodge panel vans. The drivers seat was frozen in one position, so I couldn't drive the thing. My feet wouldn't reach the pedals.
Still have a rotary phone that we use in the house. An ITT desk model that was in the house when we moved in. You can hear better on that phone than any cordless model.
