DAN’S PAPERS
Page 44 June 14, 2013
danshamptons.com
Hello (Continued from previous page) up back then, there was an up side to having a phone, but it was a negative upside. Because the phone was in the house, you’d go out of the house to hang out or to play. You’d go over to somebody else’s house. Or you’d go hang out on the street corner. People related rather well one to another back then when the phone was not an issue. We’d go to coffee houses to listen to musicians. We’d go to libraries to study books. We’d sit out on lawns or the beach undisturbed except for portable radios. Nobody could bother us with a phone call if we did any of those things. That world I occupied growing up was even further different from the world of telephones that were in my father’s era. Out in Montauk, where my dad owned a store, in his era many
people were without phones altogether and enjoyed the life of no tyranny of telephones. Those that had phones had just four digits. In an earlier time, our house phone in Montauk was 2994. Someone would dial that, it would ring at our house. Or if we were just starting out with the telephone and didn’t want a full commitment, we could get a “party line.” They’d bring us a phone, but there would be several neighbors who had this same number. There would be an office somewhere that had a switchboard operator who would answer an incoming call and, if it was for one of us, would have all four phones ring at the same time. It was by chance if the right person was home. Another person might take a message. Or not. As for outgoing calls, you’d pick up your
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The operative phrase was, “Do you know where your children are?” and of course we didn’t. But we could hope. party line phone and if there was someone on it you’d just hang up, or you could listen in if you wanted to. You’d pick it up again later, and if you got a dial tone you could dial the four digits, or, if you wanted to call further away, such as to East Hampton, you’d dial “O” for operator and the switchboard lady would place the call for you. It was pretty expensive calling long distance. When my mom told me about that, I thought it was pretty funny. What a way to have a telephone. It didn’t even occur to me at that time how rude the system was I was living in and how she enjoyed the freedom from phones just as we do today with cell phones. In many ways, if you think this through, you see how much private time and separate time we all had back then, even if it was sometimes interrupted. You will also see how we rarely knew where anybody was if they weren’t at work or at home. There was a lot of crime going on and a lot of danger in the world. The operative phrase was, “Do you know where your children are?” and of course we didn’t. But we could hope. This was a real downside back then. You could get separated from your friends and family in a crowd back then. You’d have no way of telling them where you were. And they couldn’t call you. Back then there was always a meeting point where everybody agreed they’d meet if they got separated. Not today. Today, an operative phrase is “Call me when you get near East Hampton, I’ll guide you in.” Why give directions when you can do that? Or just have them punch in your address into the phone and have the GPS guide them in? And we don’t even need encyclopedias or libraries anymore. If you’re sitting at dinner in a restaurant and the talk turns to Beethoven and what year he was born, there’s never anyone who says, “I’ll look it up when we get home.” Everybody simply whips out their cell phones and we race to see who gets it first. By the way, there’s something fascinating that happened when the telephone company said they were adding a three-digit prefix to the four digits we had to dial in my parents’ day. Did you ever wonder why there are the alphabet letters on the number buttons of your phone? It happened like this. Before the prefix, if you were in Montauk you dialed the four digits. If you wanted to call East Hampton, you called the switchboard and they would put it through. After the prefix, you could dial East Hampton yourself. If the four-digit number of your friend in East Hampton was 6266, you’d simply dial EH 4 as the three-digit prefix. The numbers on your phone that now said E and H and 4, then 6266. So that’s how that happened. That’s 324. Get it? 725 was Sag Harbor 5. 267 was Amagansett 7. And, of course, if they wanted to call you, Montauk was now Montauk 8. Uh, excuse me, my cell phone is vibrating, I have to take this call.