The Family Wall Phone: My Life Is An Open Book And Tangled Cord

Many families in the 70s had a communal wall-mounted phone, and finding any amount of privacy was a constant challenge.

Transcript

00:00The family wall. My life is an open book and tangled cord.

00:04A telephone in the early 1970s took two forms. One was a clunky floor model with a heavy handset

00:10and a rotary dial. The other was mounted to the kitchen wall and had a long curly cord just

00:16waiting to kink up. It might have been one of those newfangled touchtone models, but most of

00:22us weren't the Rockefellers. We had one communal phone and absolutely no cone of silence. This

00:28lack of privacy suited my dad, the founder of the phone feast, just fine. He didn't like talking on

00:34the phone much to begin with, and the phone was usually the first thing he threatened to remove

00:39if we pushed the issue. On the other hand, we kids couldn't wait to start long conversations

00:45with our friends or be the first to answer the ring. Eventually, we learned how to live in our

00:51own little world where no one actually cared what we said. What stayed within five feet of

00:57the kitchen phone stayed near the kitchen phone. The wall-mounted landline phone remained a fixture

01:04in many houses until the first affordable cordless phones appeared on store shelves.

01:10We could now take our conversations to the next level while hiding out in the bathroom.

01:16At least we gave our neighbors with shortwave radios something to chew on.