Funny Things You Were Guilty Of… in the 1970s
- Thread starter Scotty
- Start date
For all the GMC Eleganza owners, their own clothing line..lol
I have more photos, but I think this says it all.
I have more photos, but I think this says it all.
What in the WORLD is going on with that collar (says the guy with an embarrassing amount of vintage 70's clothing in his closet)?!
I got burned years ago by the rotary phone thing in Watson Lake, YKT. I needed to page someone using a 1-800 number in the US. The only phones available in the whole town were all rotary. I could call the number needed but could not enter my return telephone number. I was suppose to give him my call back number so I could to tell him when I would be in Fairbanks so he could book a commercial flight to there. I finally called a 1-800 number in Toronto for IBM and got the operator to enter the required info to activate his pager with the return payphone where I was standing at the Watson Lake airport.
Also Northwestel would not accept my ATT telephone credit card for a direct call to him. I stopped in there a few years later for fuel and they still only had rotary dial.
I wasn't born until the mid-eighties, so I'm really more of a 90s kid. Even so, we still had a party line with a rotary phone when I was little, on account of being out in the boonies. We eventually got our own line with touch-tone capabilities, but I'll never forget my irritated mother urging the bored widow Collins to get off the line and stop eavesdropping!
"the bored widow Collins" Are you sure you weren't living in 19th century rural England?!
I love it.
I wonder why they removed the white outlines on the pockets.
I'm from the jungle (alder trees, vine maple and cedar stumps) a few miles from Arlington WA. Our driveway was a quarter mile of gravel and mud. School bus ride was 45 minutes each way after riding my Schwinn Sting Ray a mile to the nearest school bus stop and leaving it in a neighbor's shed. I don't exactly say I grew up in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains because I haven't completely grown up.
We had a party line phone in the early 1970s, several years on the waiting list for a private line. The local phone system was literally a switchboard until the mid 1970s - dial 1 before any number and the operator would ask "your number please" so they knew which house to bill for long distance.
My mom's side of the family is from Japan. To arrange a phone call with my grandparents, mom would mail a postcard so they knew which day and time we would call. Overseas long distance calls were expensive - you were buying time on an analog trans-pacific telephone cable. The sound quality on those calls was similar to Nasa Apollo recordings.
I stopped by the Arlington Times once while I was in high school. In the back room a man with thick glasses was patiently typesetting next week's newspaper. He was using tweezers to pick each letter from a large assortment and proportionally setting the text for offset printing - all heavy machinery. That was in the late 1970s.
Through my childhood in the 60s and early 70s in country New South Wales we had a wall mounted winder phone with a magneto that rang a bell at the exchange about 7 miles away. The operator would answer and we would ask for the person we wanted to be connected to. Name or number were okay. When the phone rang, if it was a Morse code ‘D’ (long and 2 shorts) it was for us and we would answer. I’m not sure how many phones were on our party line. Maybe 3 or 4.
Our phone number was 6D. We got a dialling phone about 1972.
Our phone number was 6D. We got a dialling phone about 1972.
Sounds familiar... As a much younger person, I lived on a island off the coast of Maine. We had telephones on the island but the only direct connection to the mainland was by way of the marine operator at Kittery Point. If you needed it, it was at the post office and you had to give them a while to start the generator to run the radio because the batteries were usually dead and then the tubes had to warm up...
Local calls were great. All the phones on the island were on a single line. I think that there were something between a dozen and sixteen. All were coded by a Morse code number like Gerry mentioned. This actually also functioned as universal call forwarding. If you were in earshot of a phone and it rang your ring - just pick it up. If it rand again and someone knew where the called party was, he would pick up. If it rang three really long (O in code) that was an emergency and then everybody would pick up an listen.
I bet that they have their own cell phone tower now.
Matt_C
Local calls were great. All the phones on the island were on a single line. I think that there were something between a dozen and sixteen. All were coded by a Morse code number like Gerry mentioned. This actually also functioned as universal call forwarding. If you were in earshot of a phone and it rang your ring - just pick it up. If it rand again and someone knew where the called party was, he would pick up. If it rang three really long (O in code) that was an emergency and then everybody would pick up an listen.
I bet that they have their own cell phone tower now.
Matt_C
In the 1950s when I was a kid we had a 4 party line. The phone company offered 1, 2, and 4 party line service. Our number ended in an R which told the operator which party to ring and maybe bill.. All party line phones had an added small glass vacuum tube installed the inside, That tube responded to what ever signal the operator sent. I never tried to figure out how that worked. I know that all party line phones needed an extra wire hooked to ground (yellow) that private lines did not use. I do know that they rang between tip and ground or ring and ground. That only allowed two parties on the circuit. Now 65 years later I guess I will have to figure out what was in that tube and what they did to get the other two parties. I am guessing they changed the ringer frequency which is normally 90 volts at 20 cycles.
What does all of this have to do with GMCs?.
