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| Party lines meant sharing a phone line, and never knowing who might be listening |
Party lines sound fun until you remember
what they really were. If you grew up in Iowa before the 1970s, they usually
meant sitting at the kitchen table waiting for your neighbor to quit jawing so
you could make one lousy phone call.
Half
the time it was impatience, suspicion, and somebody wondering who in the world
had been talking for forty-five minutes.
Hollywood
got hold of the idea in 1959 and turned it into Pillow Talk with
Doris Day and Rock Hudson. Two strangers sharing a line, then romance and
comedy break out. Nice enough on the movie screen. But in real life, sharing a
line usually meant grumbling and hanging the receiver up harder than necessary.
Instead
of every house having its own private phone connection—two, four, six,
sometimes even more families were tied into the same wire. One line. Several
households. Zero privacy.
