Rotary Dial Phones – Improving Life

I heard from a woman today that purchased a Western Electric rotary dial telephone from me for her home. She wrote to tell me that that her mother, who has Alzheimer’s disease and lives with her is once again answering the home phone when it rings. She said that her mother had stopped answering the telephone as she was confused about which button to press on the cordless phone. Thanks to that old simple telephone with its familiar ringing sound, her mother’s life had improved–and for that the daughter is thankful. Also just recently I restored an avocado Western Electric model 554 wall phone made in 1960 for the grandmother of a close friend. Grandma had two cordless phones in her home but was frustrated by them. It seems the radio frequency of the cordless phone interferes with her hearing aid devices—causing them to squeal. Now with the wall phone, matching the colors of her kitchen hanging in her home she finds herself going for the Western Electric phone over the cordless phone. I had put a long handset cord on her phone allowing her the ability to sit at the kitchen table or stand in her kitchen, talking while doing other chores. And again, she loves to hear the ring of the loud dual harmonic brass ringer bells. When I see her she reminds me each time how much she loves her “new” phone, which is very gratifying to me.

So as these old rotary dial phones became abandoned for a more modern telephone that was designed to improve our ways of life it is ironic that just the opposite has taken place. The small cordless telephone, with it’s many tiny buttons and conveniences have become more of an inconvenience for those that grew up with a solid, well built Western Electric telephone. It is just another reason to bring these telephones of yesteryear out of the basements and attics of America and back into use again, so that they may do what they were intended for in the first place—to improve our way of life!