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I just spent the better part of an hour trying to find my cell phone. It’s something that seems to happen to me a few times a day as I get older and stupider. My daughter Samantha says I should use my “find my phone App” – I don’t know what the hell that is, and how can I use it if I don’t have my cellphone?
Is it just me or has everyone else noticed that on the streets, in restaurants, even in movie theaters while the movie IS PLAYING… people are on their damned cell phones all the time. Many of them are “scrolling”, sitting hunchbacked and turning screen after screen as if there’s something urgent there that they might miss.
When I was a kid people didn’t use the telephone except when there was an emergency. In fact, back then, not everyone even had a telephone! I remember my mom would be terrified, her heart in her mouth, when the phone would ring because 90 percent of the time it meant someone was in trouble, had an accident, or was dead. Using the telephone back then was more like breaking the glass and pulling the fire alarm in an office building today. it wasn’t used to just chat with people, or as is common today, to connect to websites, or scroll endlessly through pictures that people they don’t even know have posted to Facebook, or Twitter, or a hundred other sites like that.
As time went on people started to use the phone to connect with their family more or chat with neighbors… but only if they lived in the local dialing area, because if you called anywhere else you were charged by the minute—more in the daytime, and less if you called after 11pm. This was especially true for long distance calls, but thankfully in those days most families lived in the same neighborhood. I clearly remember when my brother was in jail in the Army in Germany—(Hmm, I guess that’s another story for another time), and we set one of those timers people use for cooking next to the phone when we called him to make sure we didn’t go over three minutes.
Back then the phone company, and there was only ONE phone company back then… it had operators you could call for help, and if you dialed 411 a special operator could tell you the telephone number of just about anyone in the country. How the hell did they do that anyway??
I remember when they broke up Ma Bell and made them split up into separate companies, and some people thought it was the right thing to do, and some thought otherwise. At first, I was one of the people who thought “Let’s leave well enough alone” … but then the phone company did something that sounded great but was really really sneaky. Whoever thought this promotion up was like the king of crooks.
It started in California. They gave away thousands and thousands of free answering machines… wasn’t that a wonderful gesture????? So now when you made a call to someone and they weren’t home, you listened to the phone ring over and over and finally you actually got a recording of them saying they weren’t home! And the missed call which was previously free because no one ever answered it, now became a fairly lengthy local or long distance call you got billed for because the call was completed by the generously provided answering machine. What a fucking racket that was!
I’m dating myself, but back in the 1950’s and 60’s there were pay phones everywhere—maybe even more than one pay phone for every living soul, and two comic strip characters. Dick Tracy and Sam Ketchum were the only ones with something like a mobile phone and in their case it was actually a wristwatch, not an Apple watch that can be used to order a movie, take pictures, wake you up in the morning, eliminate the need for newspapers and magazines, or even tell you how fast your heart was beating the moment you missed a step and fell down a flight of stairs. Their phone was Just a plain old wristwatch with a leather band and two little hands, one that showed you the hour and the other for the minutes.
Believe it or not, I actually ate 100% of my lunches during the 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th grades in a phone booth in one of my parent’s luncheonettes so that I didn’t occupy a precious stool where a paying customer might sit. So, among my many other fields of expertise, I may very well be the world’s greatest authority on public phone booth accessories and accoutrements having spent thousands of hours in phone booths throughout the borough of Brooklyn.
Quite by accident I developed a system of eating the different individual parts of my meals one at a time by sliding my lunch plate under the pay telephone and rotating it while I ate so that a quarter to one third of the plate was exposed at any one time. This rotational eating pattern of mine still rears its ugly head every now and then when I let my guard down, and, I have to be very careful to never ever eat in any place where the dinnerware has those plates that are segmented into three or four sections or I fall right back into my plate spinning routine!
Sometime between the third and fourth grade the lease expired on my parents Luncheonette on the corner of Amboy St. and Pitkin Avenue, and they had a brand-new luncheonette built in the building immediately next door by the Liquid Soda Fountain Company. Now, you’re probably wondering why or even how I could remember the name of the contractor that built that store. Well, quite by accident, and while living here in Florida I got reacquainted with some old friends from my youth and in conversation one day they mentioned this girl that we all went to school with who had a name that’s pretty hard to forget. Her name is Lois Hamburger and she lives at a nearby community called Ibis, and her dad, Jack Hamburger was the contractor that built my parents luncheonette… where my phone booth “lunchroom” was.
This new luncheonette had a brand-new phone booth! It was a life altering experience! First of all, the new phone booth had a shiny quarter round shelf under the pay phone that was made of grey metal. That was a huge improvement from the old wooden quarter round that over the years had had the initials of hundreds of people carved into it, and the remnants of dozens upon dozens of pieces of double bubble or some other lesser-known brand of chewing gum stuck to the bottom side. There mighta been the remnants of some chiclets there too, but it was a long time ago and the memory is not what it used to be.
Another welcome change was a light in the booth that came on automatically whenever the door was closed. And then there was “the Life Altering New Addition”. In the upper left-hand corner of the phone booth there was this metal box that was maybe 9 inches wide by 6 inches deep, and maybe a foot tall, and on the underside was a metal toggle switch, and that switch TURNED ON A FAN!!!!!
Holy shit! Phone booths never had a fan before that… a breeze… it was heavenly. Could life get any better than this!
Well, it’s now Saturday morning May 30th, 2026. Good Lord… can ya’ believe it 2026? And I was about to call my friend Jay to see how he was doing with his recently fractured left foot when I noticed that there are still letters on each number on my cell phone. Frankly, I thought they had gotten rid of the letters years ago because there’s no names attached to phone numbers anymore… so are they really needed?
I still remember our phone number from our apartment on East 3rd St between Avenues M & N from when I was a kid. It was HY-8-2382… meaning Hyacinth 8-2382. All phone numbers started with a name like Hyacinth or Dumont, or Beechnut. There was even a number one song by the Marvelettes called Beechnut Four Five Seven Eight Nine—and I still remember some of the lines!
“My number’s Beechnut 4 5 7 8 9”
“I’d like to get to know you”
“I’d like to make you mine”
“My number’s Beechnut 4 5 7 8 9”
“You can call me up and have a date any old time”
And back then you could hardly listen to the radio for an hour without hearing an ad For Sachs Quality Furniture. And every person in New York City knew that Melrose Five, Five Three Hundred was the number to call for Sachs Quality Furniture.
Before I finish this long running train of thought about phones, which could go on for hours if not for time constraints, I would be remiss in not mentioning the startling differences between my experiences with phones and those of my wife LaVonda. She grew up in the small town of Marion, Kansas. Her parent’s business had a business telephone. I can still remember their number from almost 60 years ago. It was sixteen… just a 1… and a 6!
Back home in New Jersey I have an old Marion Kansas phone directory. There’s a lady that lived on South Cedar Street. Her telephone number was ONE… that’s it… Just ONE! I’ll bet she didn’t have much trouble remembering her telephone number when she reached old age!
Incredibly, we had a telephone on the farm we lived on, but we didn’t actually have a telephone number. It was a rural party line that served six families. The way you could tell when it was your phone that was ringing was by the number of long and short rings. Our number was two longs and a short. Most of the time we could tell that some of our neighbors were listening in on our calls! Well, that’s enough babbling for one day….
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Smoke Inn, its employees, or its affiliates.
