telephone memories

[Dave Doherty]

Nice article, Donna. Thanks for passing it along.

I wonder how many of us remember party lines?

After he retired, my grandfather lived in New Hampton, NH. He was on an 
eight-party line.

You could always tell who got a call by the ring pattern - a sequence of 
short and/or long rings. His ring was three shorts. One neighbor was a long 
and two shorts, another was two shorts and a long, and so on.

It was not unusual to pick up the phone and hear somebody else using the 
line, because you generally did not get an indication when another party was 
dialing out. But if you sat right next to the phone, sometimes you could 
hear the clapper moving with another party's dialing pulses.

It was all magical, back in the day.

-d


>