Like Ohio Edison, the Lorain Telephone Company seemed to run ads in the Journal almost every day in the 1960s. Why? Because it was a time in which new services and products were being launched.
Thus the Lorain Telephone Company's newspaper advertising, with its liberal use of clip art and illustrations, often had a cobbled-together look to it.
It could also be somewhat amusing, viewed through the vantage point of sixty years later. The ad below, which ran in the Journal on October 20, 1962, depicts the benefit of a phone in the bedroom – namely, it provides a way for a woman in the middle of vacuuming a way to take a break.
Today, land lines are largely extinct. With the likelihood of both parents working to make ends meet, who's home to answer it anyway? (I still have a land line but I'm not sure why.)
Today, roughly 47% of the workforce in the United States is female. For quite some time now, in many households (and I'm not talking just the affluent ones), it's necessary to bring in a cleaning person once a week to help out. (It will be interesting to see how the current lack of participation in the work force affects this particular profession.)
Anyway, the lifestyle that we self-absorbed Baby Boomers enjoyed while growing up – with a stay-at-home mother who cooked and cleaned – is pretty much gone forever.
It seems like yesterday that having a second phone line in your home meant that you had "arrived". Today, everyone has at least one phone of their own, even po' folx like moi.
ReplyDeleteI still have a Western Electric rotary phone from the 1930s in working order, like this one:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.ebay.com/itm/122848859437?hash=item1c9a5cd52d%3Ag%3A%7EogAAOSwISRahZzR&mkevt=1&mkcid=1&mkrid=711-53200-19255-0&campid=5338412718&customid=&toolid=10049
I actually used to use it in my last house. We don't have a landline in this one, so it's relegated to basement storage.
I am a bit of an old-timer. I remember party lines. My grandparents had a candlestick telephone:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candlestick_telephone#/media/File:Candlestick_phone.JPG
ReplyDeleteWhen they were little, my kids looked forward to visiting my mom specifically to dial the rotary phone.
She was on a party line up until 2014!
We had one phone on the kitchen wall (the same one my kids couldn't wait to dial). The only thing Dad agreed to was a longer curly cord so you could reach the far end of the counter. Everyone in the family knew everyone else's business and that probably wasn't a bad thing!