Party Line Telephone Service - Tell Me Why

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launderess

launderess

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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".
 
Yes, ringer wiring in the guts of the telephone was different for party lines as opposed to private lines.  Among collectors of vintage telephones, there have been many requests on collector sites for help to get a found vintage phone to ring due to the instrument having been configured for party line service.

 

When we moved into a new house (to us -- it was built in 1927) in 1960, we discovered that we were on a party line.  I was six and not using the phone much yet, but my dad had no patience for whatever woman was constantly using the line (I remember him yelling at her) and switched our service to a private line post haste.  I presume the switch involved a technician visit to reconfigure the ringer wiring in our telephone.  I was probably at school that day.
 
Party Line

We had a party line up through the 70's. It was all that was available to us at the time. If you wanted to call someone on the party line you dialed their number, hung up, then waited for your phone to ring. When we did get a private line (along with everyone else on the line) our friends up the road were on another exchange and it was long distance to call them. You could wave to them but to call them it cost long distance rates. Our little community was in the corner of three towns. We went to Butler school, had a Bellville address, and a Lucas phone. Needless to say all of our school friends were a long distance call!
 
I'm not sure when frequency ringers came into their own. I know it was an option on the early 500 sets, but to hear family talk about their party lines in the 50's/60's, it was still ring-pattern based.

When my grandparents built their retirement home in rural MN and moved in around '80, they were on a party line with a separate ringer wire. They had that phone plan for years but never did hear another party on the line. Kept their rotary until the 90's, too, as the Touch-Tone plan cost extra!
 
Party line

Don't remember ever being on a party line.

But, my parents bought a house built in the 1970s and there were phone jacks in the kitchen and living room. The bedrooms had two locations each with telephone wires but no jack plate installed. My dad decided to put in some phone jacks to the wires. When he did they plugged in a phone and got a message that they were on a party line. This was during the 1990s well after party lines.

They never could figure out what happened and ended up just not using phones in the bedrooms until getting digital phone and cable.

Anyone heard of wiring causing a party line message? My guess was he must have attached the wires incorrectly.
 
Even though NYC was still enjoying its long gone status as the center of the universe back in the olden days (including that of AT&T), it's still amazing to me that party lines were gone by 1930.  I doubt this was so in the immediate suburban exchanges. 

 

Many parts of the country were lucky to have any telephone service available at all in 1930.  As has always been the case, Ma Bell was following the money and shunning areas that weren't going to provide an immediate return on investment.  Thank goodness for government regulations that changed all of that, albeit at a snail's pace.  

 

These days, the situation is repeating itself with telcos not being under any obligation to provide high speed internet service to rural areas if it's not worth their trouble.

 

 

 

 
 
Party lines, etc.

My grandparents had a party line until the late 1970s in an Alabama town so small our entering and leaving signs are on opposite sides of the same post. Operator assisted long distance calls were the norm into the 80s. The advent of one plus dialing was a big deal. (and being rural, just about everybody was long distance--I get that whole "you can see your neighbor wave but it's a long distance call thing.")

I now own their home and have the same phone number. I'd say it's been the same since 1938, but I know it changed with the advent of 7 digit dialing. I had to call Triple A for service this afternoon... I'm not sure what map the dispatcher was looking at when she asked if I was between Rodeo Drive and the post office.
"M'am, we lost our post office and zip code in 1976..." (and we don't have any drives...they're all roads and only a few of them are paved.)

Both of our homes have POTS--plain old (hardwired, copper line) telephone service. Telcos are trying to phase out POTS and often use bundled services and deals to bait and switch users to digital or VoIP. A friend designs 911 systems, and he told me several years ago that current POTS line subscribers were protected by law--at least for now. Our landline in our primary home is also POTS, but AT&T switched us without fully disclosing what they were doing as part of an internet upgrade. We figured out what they'd done when the tornadoes hit us (Tuscaloosa Alabama) in 2011, and our phone wouldn't work. We had to fight to get the POTS line back. Maybe it's the country girl in me, but I still want to be hardwired, and I want my phone to work when the power is out... Interestingly, the power line is still strung on poles to the country house, but the telephone line has been buried for decades.

Sarah
 
We had a two party line growing up until about 1965. The "party" was my aunt and uncle next door which worked out perfectly because mom could call my aunt by dialling 1191 instead of their full number Di4-0596 (still remember it). As well because my grandma and great aunt who both lived 100 miles away could call mom or my aunt and one of us kids would run next door to tell our moms to pick up the phone and they could have a 3 way call without paying for it.

Party lines still exist here with Bell but you cannot sign up for one any longer My friend still has his but his "party" he figures has long ago either died or got rid of hers. I don't think Bell can discontinue it as much as they'd like to .
 
I recall my mother talking about her mom having a party line into the 70's.  She lived in a little spot on the map town 10 miles from us.  We all had the same telephone company though...Loretto Telephone Company.  Lawrenceburg and Summertown had Bell Telephone.  Lawrenceburg was local but Summertown was long distance...and it was only a 30 mile drive within the same county.
 
My parents were on a party line until the mid '80's.  At the time I had a clock radio with a phone that was set up for a private line only.  When the phone in my bedroom would ring my sisters and I would pick up and eavesdrop until Mom or Dad caught us.  I still remember the name of the lady on our line, Viola Hansen.  She was the neighborhood gossip so it was great to be able to get one over on her once in awhile. 
smiley-wink.gif
 
Tennessee had a strange situation where the state required than anyone in the county be able to call the county seat for a local call. They also had a requirement quite late that each county had to have a pay phone (generally at the courthouse) available for the citizenry.
 
The party line may have went away but the phone companies continued to use various multiplexing technologies to get extra customers onto the same cooper pair for many years.

They used what was often referred to as "pair gain" or in the UK "DACS". The earliest systems just put an extra line on the copper pair by shifting the frequency up out of range of your ears. So called carrier line systems.
The second line was just occupying frequencies you couldn't hear. Fairly simple equipment at either end could shift it down to normal audio channels again.

Later systems used digital time division multiplexing to carry multiple lines simultaneously.

Pair gain became less necessary as cheaper, smaller digital concentrators became widespread when TDM based digital switches like Bell Labs 5ESS and Nortel DMS in North America or Ericsson AXE, Alcatel E10 and S12, Siemens ESWD and so on in Europe.

By the mid 80s smaller remote switching units made rural communities much more cost effective but then very small cabinet based remote switches / concentrators meant you could put them far closer to end users.

That meant instead of hundreds of long and expensive copper pairs, you'd short ones terminating in a cabinet and a fibre running back to the main switch in a central office.

The advent of DSL (ADSL or VDSL) also killed pairgain and shared wires because you need dedicated copper to each end user.

At this stage the phone network's primary purpose is to carry data and the copper is vanishing and being replaced bit by bit with fibre to home.

Voice service is really just an app on an IP network

If you still have dial tone service from a central office PSTN switch maybe make a recording of it because in a decade or so that stuff will be as obsolete as VHS tapes and telex/teletype.
 

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