Remember the old Doris Day and Rock Hudson movie Pillow Talk?
Doris played an interior decorator, Jan, who shared a phone line with an obnoxious, lothario song-writer named Brad Allen, played by Rock Hudson. When Brad learns that Jan is single and attractive, he pretends to be a Texas gentleman, Rex Stetson, and then tries to ingratiate himself to her by convincing her via the party-line that Rex is too good to be true.
Party-lines were pretty common in the fifties. When we first moved into our home on Liggett Street we shared a phone-line with another party.
I didn’t use the phone much in those days, and rarely was inconvenienced but I remember my older sister Karin used to go round and round with the man on the other end of the line. He was always interrupting her when she was talking to her girl-friends, and of course, my dad would then start to yell at her for tying up the phone. And Karin would usually end up storming off to her room, in tears – unlike Doris Day, she was quite a drama queen.
I still remember our old phone number – UNiversity 3-0707.
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Actually party lines were very cool…and the guy on the other end was an ass, just for the record. I can out-do you on phone number memory…DIamond 37172. One of my all time favorite phone numbers. And as I got older, and the callers were male…the phone cord got ripped out of the wall, thus leading to the invention of plug-in phone lines.