Eldergays, did you have a telephone chair in your younger years?

It was mounted on the arch going into the breakfast room. The cord was short - not long enough to reach the kitchen. You could sit at the table and chat.

Did you have a telephone dialing pencil, R1?

No, but I had a telephone repairman once.

I wish. We had two phones, both wall phones with short cords and you had to stand next to them and talk. And we were the absolute last family I knew to get touch tone phones. They were both dial phones.

And my father was an engineer at the fucking phone company!!

R2, I always washed pencil marks off that phone. I lived with savages.

I didn't have room for both a telephone chair and a fainting couch.

I’m proud to say that my childhood home included a telephone chair setting. It also had a cord that reached into the kitchen and into the dining room. This came into play when we called family back in the homeland (England).

My grandparents had the requisite 1950's "gossip bench" in their center hall, and it's one of my favorite things that I've kept.

It's very similar to the one in the photo.

Use of uncomfortable telephone chairs no doubt kept conversations mercifully short.

Not quite. But my parents added a second phone to their house in the early 70s and we had on the second floor a tiny little desk with matching chair that almost fit under it. An abomination in the Fauxlonial style, my mother liked it because of its cruelly diminutive scale (one woman's fuck you to a house of tall men), and she refinished the cheap poplar wood piece with something of a cat lick sheen, rough and uneven as a cat's tongue. This stood at the point where the front and rear stairs connected in the oldest and most please corner. But I never saw that little telephone desk without hating the thing for it's ugliness and inutility, and the Victorian shaving mug filled filled with plastic daffodils and the town telephone directory, and a pen and notepad.

I don't think the day ever came that my parents thought, "now wasn't it a good thing we put in a second line for emergency calls late at night."

My aunt and uncle and cousins lived in such a rural area of Missouri (intentionally-they moved away from the city to “get away from it all”) and the only phone was in a closet. There was a bench to sit on, but you were in a bedrooom closet surrounded by clothes.

And I still don’t know what the purpose or reasons for it were, but they had a party line. They literally shared a phone with neighbors that were miles away. So if you wanted to make a phone call, you might pick up the phone and somebody stranger would already be on it and you’d say, excuse me, and then hang up. And when you were using it, one of those distant strangers may get on the line while you were on the phone. So fucking weird.

And I don’t know how expensive long distance calling was, but my mom and her sister would use operator assisted person to person calls to update one another. If my aunt had come to visit and then flown home, you’d get a call and the operator would say “Will you accept a person to person call from Ms. Ima Tome?” and you’d say “no” and hang up, but that was my aunt calling to say “I’m at home” so we knew she got home safely. 🙄

I don’t feel old. But I if I sent a 20 year old kid in a time machine back to my childhood, they’d be shocked at how absolutely fucking weird things were.

No but I wish we did. I like the way that looks.

R11, they had party lines in rural areas because that was the only service they could get. In sparsely populated communities, subscribers were spread over such wide distances that the phone companies simply provided a single loop circuit connecting mulitple households rather than lay out individual lines, which was costly and not cost effective. Also, many rural communites were served by one main switchboard (usually at the county level) and could not readily accommodate many multiple private lines.

In the big cities, party lines were offered at discount rates. You had to pay extra to get your own individual private line.

no, we didn't have a chair. we would sit on the floor. My grandparents had a crank phone that you would crank and then the operator came on and you would tell her the number you wanted to be connected to. That was 60 years ago which doesn't really seem that long for how much things have drastically changed.

I had a service. Susanswerphone. I'm the brunette in their commercial.

Hee! My grandmother had a similar chair in her entry hall R8. Ahhh, the good old days.

R2, yes.

Did you all dial the phone with a pencil?

Ours was similar to this one...

We had a built-in telephone "nook/niche."

Our phone was mounted on the dining room wall (which was the closest place to the utility pole outside). We had to sit at the dining room table to talk. When I was a teenager, I took it upon myself to get an extra-long curly cord for the receiver. It barely reached the living room, so I would push a living room chair into the doorway between the two rooms. Even after I got a cordless phone, it took me years to get over thinking I had to remain in one place to talk.