Share Memories of Your Childhood Rotary Telephone

The first thing that comes to my mind when I think back to a rotary telephone in my life as a youth was probably in the mid 1960’s. My family lived in Huntsville, Alabama–I was about ten years old. I came from a large family with six girls and three boys.? When I was about age ten four of my sisters were teenagers. You know how that could tie up a telephone. There was no call waiting, no caller I.D., no phone answering devices. We had a beige wall phone that hung in the hallway of our relatively small three bedroom brick ranch home. It was a common sight to see the telephone cord stretched like a piano wire down the hallway and into the bathroom. At the other end of the cord was one of my older sisters, more than likely talking to a boy. It would be impossible for any other callers to get through to our house as the phone always seemed to be in use.

On one particular day I remember hanging around watching television. It was late afternoon and time for my father to return home from work. Sure enough the front door burst open and in stormed Dad–he wasn’t happy. With words unsaid he walked down the hallway, following the stretched coilded handset cord, pushed open the bathroom door, grabbed the phone out of my older sister’s hand and slammed it on the chrome hook! Apparently he had been trying to call home before leaving work–all afternoon and he couldn’t get through. Just like the music of the day, life revolved around that beige wall telephone. The telephone number was 205-539-8779. That was over forty years ago.

Eventually he broke down and allowed my sisters to get a seperate phone line in their bedroom. The phone they got was a black model 500 with a metal finger wheel. That phone was always busy and eventually the teens would call the home phone and ask my parents, or whomever answered to have the person using the model 500 to hang up so the kids could call that phone.