BY KYLE LOVERN

When growing up at Nolan, not many people had telephones in their homes. It was indeed a luxury to have a phone in your house.

I can remember having ours at a young age while in grade school and being able to call a couple of friends who also had the privilege of having a telephone.

I remember talking to one local businessman in Williamson years later. He talked about his family coming back from Huntington on U.S. 52 in the late 1950s and his father hitting a cow that was in the road. He had to walk a couple of miles and they came to our house because that was the first one he found that had a telephone.

The first phone we had was a “party” line. This is where you shared the line with a couple of neighbors. It was nothing to pick up the phone to use it and someone else was already on the line, but they were not even in the same household.

As most people that used a party line know, these telephone calls were not private. Just imagine having a phone in your home with the same number run to several extensions in other rooms. Someone on any of these phones could hear the conversation of a person in the household that was on another telephone.

But even with a party line, you considered your family blessed to have a phone to use. Party lines were extremely common in the 1930s and 1940s in rural areas but even extended into the 1960s. I guess the Bell Telephone Company was finally able to run enough phone lines into the country where everyone had their own number and line.

You could pay for a “private” line, but that was more expensive.

Long-distance phone calls cost more too. If you had family in other states or even a town as close as Kermit, it was considered “long distance,” which would add to your monthly bill.

Making a coast-to-coast phone call a century ago was very expensive. Back in 1915, a three-minute daytime phone call from New York City to San Francisco cost $20.70. Adjusted for inflation today that means the rather abrupt call cost more than $500 in today’s money. But $20 back then was a lot of money. Can you believe spending that kind of money to make one long-distance call?

Kids today will never know what it is like to have a “landline.” Although some of us still don’t live in a place with good cellphone reception, so we still have our home phones.

The baby boomer generation didn’t quite have to pick up the phone and ask the local operator to ring a certain number for them. Think Sarah on the old “Andy Griffith Show.” But things were much different growing up in the 1950s, 60s and 70s.

Now most everyone in a family has their own cellphone. Not only can they talk or text from anywhere, but they can also surf the internet, watch YouTube and do other functions you see on a larger laptop computer.

Think about a youngster trying to use an old rotary-style phone. They probably would look at it like it was something from outer space. And imagine if they picked up the phone and there was already someone on the line talking, and they couldn’t use the phone until their neighbors were through gossiping.

Even the updated push-button phone some of us still use as landline phones in our homes are probably alien to the younger generation. All they’ve been used to using was a small, square, thin device with a screen. They slide it to their many choices and probably have speed dials where they only push a single button to make their calls.

However, most of the younger generation won’t even call these days. Texting is the thing and it’s even that way for younger adults. I’ve had to learn to text just to be able to contact my kids and grandkids. Believe me – I don’t like it – but I’ve had to make the adjustment.

Of course now you can make Zoom calls where you can actually see the person on the other end on your phone or laptop. Many businesses conduct their meetings this way now that many people work from home. This blossomed during the COVID pandemic when most of us were quarantined and could not go into an office or place of work.

Phones have reshaped our lives, whether it was asking to use the line on the old party line system or even going down the street to use an old pay phone booth.

We take it for granted now. If I’m at the grocery store and forget a couple of items, I just pull out my cellphone and call my wife to remind me of what I need to pick up.

So the next time you pull out your phone, spend a minute contemplating what your life and the world would be like if the phone had never been invented.

(Kyle Lovern is a longtime journalist in the Tug Valley. He is now a retired freelance writer and columnist for the Mountain Citizen.)