VIEW FROM AFAR

ORIGINALLY WRITTEN DALE SUDERMAN
In 1940, Hillsboro had 25 country phone lines. Eight to 12 rural households banded together to form their own mini-phone company. They maintained their own telephone poles and a line into a central switchboard in Hillsboro.

Rural America quickly adapted new technologies. Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1875 in Boston. By 1896, a phone line was run from McPherson to William Schaeffler’s store in Hillsboro with a Mrs. Wright as the operator and Adolph Schaeffler as a messenger. His job was to run around town and let folks know they had a phone call or a message.

These were the days of the “party line.” In those days a “party line” was not the sectarian dogma of a political group or a ribald computer chat room. A party line meant that when your phone rang, all your neighbors also heard it ring.

Three long rings and one short ring meant it was time to answer the phone when I was a child. One long ring and two short rings meant a call for Elmer Boese up the road. And two long rings and one short ring were for the J.B. Wiens family.

The phone was securely mounted on the wall. Until I was 8 years old, answering the phone required finding a chair to reach the receiver and speak into the mouthpiece.

The Hillsboro newspaper had local correspondents who would chronicle which relative had visited from California, who entertained whom for dinner on Sunday and who was recuperating nicely at home after a stay in Salem Hospital.

After triangulating these neighborhood news stories, it was rumored that some correspondents gathered news from eavesdropping on their party lines.

(If so, the party line was an early, but benign, form of investigative journalism.)

There was an art form to listening to your neighbors’ calls. One picked up the receiver ever so gently to listen. Your hand had to be held over the mouthpiece to block out breathing or background noises. (A sneeze could ruin the entire project.)

During a long winter, when the charge for the battery-which operated the radio-went down, listening in to your neighbors phone calls was often a cheap and easy form of home entertainment.

Fighting off the eavesdroppers was also an art form. The occasional catty comment, “Well you know some people just don’t mind their own business,” could result in hearing several clicks by local snoops.

But mostly, one learned to speak about personal business in code, or simply accept that you were doing low-level public broadcasting when you used the telephone.

The frustration was a loquacious neighbor who hogged the line. There were no clear criteria other than, “fire,” to clearly justify when your call was urgent enough to sweetly interrupt and ask for the line?

“General ring” caused every phone on every party line to ring simultaneously. The “telephone girls” in Hillsboro announced fires, but mostly it was commercials. Thus, “Vogt’s Produce has a truckload of cherries just in from Michigan and they are for sale right now.”

There may have been general rings to announce deaths and weather emergencies, but I do not remember this.

Once a year- as I recall- there was a “telephone meeting,” often at our house. The neighbors would come over-often it seemed to happen in February-and gravely analyzed which telephone poles needed replacement and where hedge trees needed to be trimmed and where new insulators installed.

An election was held by secret ballot to select officers for the coming year and a date set to do common work. Who would bring an axe, who would contribute some tall hedge posts and did anyone have any insulators were all gravely discussed.

In a way, party lines were a form of semi-public communication. It has taken us 50 years to start using cell phones in restaurants, and again mix the boundaries if telephones are private or public communication.

Once again folks can hear us cajoling, angry, banal or cryptic with our new micro versions of the old party line.

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