The Extension
The big telephone issue these days of course is whether or not to give up our landlines. But the big deal when I was young was whether a girl could convince her folks to have an extension to the family telephone installed in her bedroom!
If they would, l remember promising my parents, I’d be completely happy and would never ask for anything again!
And – to the envy of friends who were then still extension-less – I got it, a beautiful pink princess telephone with an extra long cord so I could carry it all around my room as I chatted away.
I had a big crush on a boy named Warren at the time, and one afternoon he called me and of course I ran upstairs to take the call in the privacy of my attic bedroom. We had been talking for quite awhile when I heard my mother calling me from downstairs. I told Warren to hold on and I went out to the top of the staircase to hear what she was saying.
She was calling me to dinner, and so I hurried down to eat.
We were at the table a bit later when the doorbell rang and my father got up to answer it. It was Warren who’d come over to say I’d left the phone off the hook and no one at his house could make a call!
– Dana Susan Lehrman
Dana Susan LehrmanThis retired librarian loves big city bustle and cozy country weekends, friends and family, good books and theatre, movies and jazz, travel, tennis, Yankee baseball, and writing about life as she sees it on her blog World Thru Brown Eyes!
www.WorldThruBrownEyes.com
That is a funny story, Dana! But you were a very lucky girl, indeed. I never did convince my parents to get me an extension in my own room and had to sit on the floor in my parents’ room when I spoke to my friends. My mother often listened in.
Thanx Betsy, that is really the only thing I remember about my prized extension phone!
Of course nowadays kids get their own cell phones at much earlier ages, don’t they!
LOL, Dana. I remember this phones, but alas I did not get one as a teen. My kids had the push-button version, and the youngest even had her own line. Kind of spoiled her.
Spoiling a kid? Yep, I’m good at that!
Another gem Dana. You must have been really hungry to forget Warren on the phone. Poor guy could’ve probably handled it until his entire family couldn’t use the phone. This was funny.
Thanx Patty!
I always thought that if one party hung up, the connection would be broken after some waiting period. I didn’t know you could tie up another phone permanently!
The picture reminded me of Bell System TV commercials aimed at the very demographic you were in, complete with a catchy jingle… the “Alone Phone (it’s a phone of your own).”
Perhaps in later years a phone would disconnect after a time, but back then I think not!