Growing up without a telephone

When I was growing up on the family farm on the Callahan County side of Scranton, Texas in the ‘40s and ‘50s, we didn’t have a telephone. In fact, a lot of families there did not have telephones.

One of the reasons was probably the economic status of folks suffering from a long drought and the decline of the family farm. But a primary reason to go without a telephone was poor phone service. Downtown Scranton, in Eastland County, was served by Southwestern Bell, which provided their customers with good phone technology. However, that company’s franchise extended westward less than a mile just over the county line into Callahan County. Thus, our area of the Scranton community was beyond that boundary and in the service territory of a small company situated in Putnam, later to be absorbed by another small firm in Baird, Texas. This phone company on the Callahan County side provided poor line maintenance and antiquated equipment.

The phones in use on the rural section of the Putnam system were big wall units with cranks on the side to generate a ring signal sent down the line. Everyone was on a party line, perhaps shared by as many as eight subscribers. Your telephone was assigned an individual ring determined by the amount of time the crank was turned – two longs and a short– for example. When you heard your ring, you knew to pick up the phone and answer the call. The problem was everyone else on the party line could hear the rings, too, and pick up the phone to listen. It was a perfect gossip system. No need for a warrant to wiretap.

My mother and dad shopped and conducted business in Cisco, 12 miles to the east. A phone call from our location to Cisco would have been long distance, a service that generated extra charges back in those days. So, we went without a telephone. When Granddad Allen, my mother’s father, died, we were informed of the death via a telephone call to our neighbor across the road, Mr. Ledbetter, who had a telephone.

Without a phone, I never felt deprived of an opportunity available to kids living in larger towns and cities. Some kinds of communication may have been a little slower, but word got around. News was disseminated at the stores and post office in Scranton, at school, at church and via newspaper mail subscriptions. And there was the telephone gossip network. People always showed up to help dig graves, attend funerals and assist neighbors with emergencies even without telephones to relay the information.

By the time Sue and I married, the Callahan County telephone system had been modernized, and my parents got a home phone – a desktop model without the party line – for the first time. My brother Jack and I had insisted.

Today we have landlines, flip phones, smart phones and texting. With heads down in our smartphones, we seem to be communicating endlessly. However, I suspect the quality of interpersonal communication today is significantly inferior to that from the days when I was a boy growing up in Callahan County.