I was thinking a toy phone might be a fun interactive gift for my one year old grandson…..

And it suddenly hit me that Finn has only seen an I-phone!  As much as I love my I-phone,
I agree with many friends that is has brought many negative social behaviours along with
its convenience. I do not intend to begin that conversation.
As I looked at the brightly coloured plastic toy I-phones I was struck by the immense role
that “old phones” have played in my past and a flood of memories rushed into my brain. 

Images of the phones in my life as I grew up were numerous, the iconic black rotary phone
and its later coloured cousins that allowed buyers to coordinate their phone with their couch,
the princess phone that I pined for and the wall phone that I was attached to for hours of my
teenage life and then the push buttons that replaced the rotary dial.





I air-dialed my home phone number which will be engrained in my brain forever.
We all had phone prefix names, mine was Belmont and my cousin's Clifford.  Again,
one thought led to another and I was suddenly recalling Phone-Number songs.
“Beechwood 4-5789” 1962, The Marvelettes;  Glenn Miller’s “Pennsylvania 6-5000”;
Blondie “Call Me” 1980; “Party line” 1966, The Kinks.  How many of you had a party-line?





Memories crowded in of the many phones that were such an
important part of Movies, TV and Stage.  In many cases
the phone was not only a prop but a character itself.









The iconic phone booths in old hotels and train stations, on street corners
and gas stations all produce numerous memories.  One’s taste or status could be
determined by the style of the phone(s) at home, business or hotel.  The telephone
operator plays out numerous scripts in film and TV.  The receiver dangling off a wall
phone, the sheriff dialing a saloon phone in a western movie,  a crook yanking out
the power wires to a home phone, the sheer suspense of a phone’s ringing breaking the
silence of a scene, the delivery of a phone to the table of a restaurant customer,
the mysterious messages being played back to detectives in a murder mystery,
a young child heroically phoning for help and the repairman balancing at a phone box
high up near the wires, phone booth terror and heroics, love stories; all these classics
developed around the now “obsolete phones”.










I can hear you singing it!

It seems that I could go on for pages but I will end here and once again thank Google
for the images and this great poster to summarize my blog.