Although it's a little bit early for Valentine's Day, this vintage ad has a unique gift suggestion for the wife: a kitchen telephone.
The ad, which ran in the Lorain Journal on Feb. 5, 1963 – fifty years ago today – points out that with a kitchen phone, your wife can "visit, shop, take calls, and still tend to cooking and kids."
Ah, those were the days.
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Thinking back, I remember that the main phone in the house on E. Skyline Drive my parents built in 1965 was in the kitchen more or less (and still is). But it was on the telephone desk – too far away for my Mom to be able to stir a big bowl of something and yak at the same time, though. There was also a phone in the basement on a table next to the dryer, which became the phone my brothers and I preferred to use when we were calling up girls.However, there was nothing worse than finally getting up enough nerve to call a girl and then have Mom come down to throw in a load of laundry or something. Suddenly, what was already an awkward conversation would get even worse.
Kids – with their cell phones - will never know how good they have it.
Nowadays, I have phones all over my house – the kitchen, library, bedroom and basement – not to mention my cell phone, which I still think of as a car phone.
4 comments:
Had to laugh at the laundry interruption for phone calls. Don't forget having Mom pick up the upstairs phone and say, "Haven't you talked long enough?"
We had a black wall phone in the dining room, and our number was CHerry 4-5432.
Great ad -- reminds me of trying to stretch the phone cord across the kitchen and into a pantry to enjoy a private conversation!
Dan, have you written about the history of the Lorain Telephone Co. It's the story of the Hageman family going back, presumably, to the earliest days of telephone service in the region.
Hi Ed,
I haven't done anything on the phone company before, but that's a good idea. I have an ad from Aug 1952 announcing an open house of their new building in Downtown Lorain but it needs PhotoShop cleanup pretty badly. Thanks for the suggestion--I'll add it to the list!
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