Party Line Telephone Service - Tell Me Why

Automatic Washer - The world's coolest Washing Machines, Dryers and Dishwashers

Help Support :

launderess

launderess

Well-known member
Platinum Member
Joined
Jul 22, 2004
Messages
20,635
Location
Quiet Please, There´s a Lady on Stage
What gave with sharing a telephone line with your neighbors or half the town. Couldn't people afford their own private lines?

Just got finished watching an episode of Alfred Hitchcock presents where the plot revolves around a party line (gossip, busybodies, murder....), and don't see why anyone would put up with such a thing. Or maybe am missing something.

 
In rural areas there weren’t sufficient lines to accommodate private lines for everybody that wanted one, no matter how much you were prepared to pay. That was the situation for my family in the 60’s when we moved to the country. We had five on our party line, and I can assure you that my Mom would have gladly paid extra for a private line, she LOVED talking on the phone, and that five party line really hampered her.

Now, when I got my first telephone in 1971, it was a matter of economics, a two party line was I believe $2.65 per mo, a private line was $5.35. When I was netting about $40 to $50 per week, even that small amount made a difference.

Eddie
 
When my mother’s parents were young, this part of Idaho was almost entirely rural. Even the city I live in now was almost entirely farm land. Surrounding towns are still very rural with tiny main streets with most of the businesses and a few streets with residential houses and then the rest is farm land and rural houses. I deliver mail in one of those surrounding towns, for perspective I do one of only two city mail routes. Two. The rest are all rural and that post office has only one zip code. In the early days of telephone, a lot of those on remote farms didn’t even have telephones available to them and in these tiny towns, individual phone lines would have been enormously expensive so having a party line was the best solution. They were still better off in case of an emergency than those who didn’t have any phone at all.
 
5 party line ?

With 5 on a line, how would you call any of them, assuming you wanted to. My parents had a 2 party line, for economics I'm sure. Wichita wouldn't have had line limitation issues. But the party we were with was a family across the street that we were friends with. So if we wanted to call them, you had to dial what was a ring test number I believe, hang up the phone, let it start ringing and when it stopped ringing you knew they had picked up, then you picked up the receiver and started talking. The most convoluted thing I've ever had to deal with.

Note: We had the standard issue Western Electric wall telephone with rotary dial issued in the late 50s. When you picked up the receiver, you got a dial tone. So the ring test would have allowed for only a 2 party line at most. [this post was last edited: 1/31/2019-11:06]
 
With 5 on a line, how would you call any of them, assuming

you wanted to?

Well, everyone had their own ring. Ours was 1 long and 1 short, the other rings on our party line were 1 long, 1 long and 2 shorts, 2 longs and 1 long, 1 short 1 long. So, you had to pay attention to the rings to know if the call was for your line. We had two phones, a beige wall phone in the kitchen and an ivory Princess in Mom’s bedroom, both had dials, but they were disabled.

To place any call, you lifted the receiver and the operator came on the line. You announced you number (ours was Russian Gulch #3) and requested the number you wished to call. If the number was on your party line, you hung up and listened for the rings, and when they stopped, you knew your party was on the line and you picked up the receiver and commenced your call.

The worst part of this set up for us was that one of the neighbors had a business doing towing and heavy equipment work, and their 1 long and 2 shorts ring sometimes rang round the clock when the weather was bad.

Coming from the San Francisco Bay Area in 1963 this was a culture shock, but we soon adjusted to it just fine.

Eddie
 
In Martinez

I grew up in Martinez California and our next door neighbor had a party line. My mom explained how it worked. At the time we had no dial but operators who asked "number please" when you lifted the phone receiver. If we had this system today no one would be surprised because "Alexa" or other AR would do the asking! I am pretty sure it was to save money. Even now my ATT landline is about $50 per month which I consider expensive. My cell phone is only $30. So in those days the cost was relatively high. Oh, I keep the landline for emergency use, mainly. I think it is still a more fail-safe system.
 
Party lines were still around up here for many years, but mostly in rural areas where 'modern' switching equipment wasn't available and Ma Bell decided it wasn't worth investing in. Odd phenomenon - in some communities, Bell turned their back on offering basic phone services because they didn't make enough profit, so Co-Operative telephone companies popped up. At our first country house in the Eastern Townships, our phone service was offered by such a co-op. The downside was that party lines were the rule, not the exception. Not surprisingly when Bell was partially dismantled back in the 1990s, the co-ops went into high gear to offer updated phone services as well as internet services and cable TV - all at prices that beat the tar out of Bell!!
And believe it or not, when Chris and I bought a country getaway house in 1995, we still had the option of having a party line as our phone service. We took it - we were the only ones on the line anyway and it cost about 1/4 of what Bell wanted for a single-line service. They were on our case for YEARS trying to get us to switch. Sadly, we moved... LOL
 
as late as 1989

In 1989 My first job out of college was in rural south Arkansas. I was on a party line: I had the special ring..long forgotten. I really don't every remember it being a problem.

Now on the other hand..my sweet grandmother lived in rural Tennessee..she was on a party line and it made for a hell of a good time for her. She knew everyone's business in the county. I always knew she was doing something she shouldn't when I walked into the room and she gave me that "look" with her hand over the mouth piece. I don't know what she enjoyed more..the game show (I can't remember the name) with Monty Hall, Perry Mason or ease dropping on people's telephone conversations.
 
 
<blockquote>TurquoiseDude:  Odd phenomenon - in some communities, Bell turned their back on offering basic phone services because they didn't make enough profit,</blockquote> Not at all odd.  Profit is the driving force for Bell, AT&T, XYZ, whatever is their nomer this week.

One of my aunts/uncles had a party line on their rural road/area for some years (they married in 1969).  I recall we'd be visiting, the phone would ring, they'd listen for a moment ... "That's not ours."
 
Very entertaining training film.  It must have an interesting job trying to police bad behaviors among party line subscribers.  Hard to imagine such a thing these days given how inconsiderate people are in general.
 
Residential telephone lines in any format have never been a profitable sector for providers of switched network/local exchange services.  Local exchange carriers were mandated to offer residential service, but relied on measured rate business lines and Long Distance charges for compensatory revenue. 

 

The Bell System break-up and subsequent systematic stripping away of regulations for local exchange services have resulted in monthly rates seven or eight times higher than they were 25 years ago.  The telcos have always been provided a guaranteed rate of return for such services, and as a result of deregulation and the telcos' collective push to abandon copper service entirely, they have been allowed to raise their rates.  Even though nothing has changed with residential service for about twenty years or so, the rates have gone up to compensate for the negative return on investment.  In the past, most PUCs wouldn't have allowed this, but regulatory power over the telcos these days is negligible compared to what it used to be.
 
We had a party line until about '58 or '59. It was 4-party service, and two of the other subscribers hogged the line for hours - my mom said one day that Georgia N. and Ruth S. were on (with each other) every time she tried the line for 13 hours! After discussing this with my dad, Mom called the phone company (Ohio Consolidated at the time) the next day to request a private line. It took a few weeks for installation, but that was the last time we had to contend with waiting to use the phone. Many years later (80's), we discovered they had actually put us on another party line with no other subscribers. One day the upstairs phone (AE 80) quit ringing, along with the ringer box for the basement wall phone, but the ringer in the WE 2554 wall phone would now ring. When we contacted GTE, they told us they had installed new switching equipment, and our phones with frequency type ringers would no longer ring. The repairman visited, and replaced the ringer in the AE 80 with a straight-line type so it would work. He told us we were now on a true private line.

I really enjoyed the film Launderess posted, and got a good laugh out of it. The marionettes reminded me of the sequence in a movie I saw as a kid - "Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm".
 

Similar threads

peteski50
LG Complaints
Replies
2
Views
9
bingwsguy
B

Latest posts

Back
Top