It's an ad for the Lorain Telephone Company with a Thanksgiving theme that ran in the Lorain Journal back on November 23, 1953. The ad suggests giving loved ones a call on the holiday, and provides a handy out-of-town rate chart for calls from Lorain, Amherst, Avon and Vermilion to variety of cities in Ohio and other states.
Calling from Lorain to Elyria during the day would cost 10 cents; Cleveland, 25 cents; Columbus, 65 cents; Chicago, a buck; Washington D. C., a dollar and five cents; and San Francisco, two dollars and thirty-five cents.
Of course, nowadays, people don't have to wait until a major holiday to call a loved one or friend. With cell phones, you make the call without any sort of thought about the cost, whether it's during the day or evening. But you pay dearly for it; I cringe whenever I make my monthly Verizon payment, but at least Verizon's customer service and coverage is much better than my old Trashphone Tracfone.
Lastly, seeing the little illustration of an operator makes me feel wistful. It's been a long time – probably the 1980s – since I've spoken to an actual operator while trying to get a phone number of someone. I remember how several old Ohio State dorm-mates tracked me down a few years after I graduated, since my number was listed. Now, no one's cell phone is part of a massive listing, so you're pretty much out of luck if you don't know someone's number.
I'm having a hard time getting used to not having a land line. I still get home from work, looking for the answering machine that isn't there, wondering if anyone called, or if my virus protection expired, etc.
6 comments:
Hey Dan- I remember calling home “collect” from college and going through an operator. Talk about wistful…we had a party line and had to wait until miss yakalot across the street got off the line. It’s nuts what we pay monthly for phone and TV service nowadays. Not to mention the internet. Added together it’s Probably 5x more expensive than the avg 1953 mortgage payment.
If I remember correctly, the rates in the ad were for the first three minutes; additional time was extra on a minute-by-minute basis. So if I were to make a 10-minute call to my sister in New York, it might cost about $4, which would translate to about $45 today, very roughly.
I pay $66 a month with unlimited data and stuff , although my phone likes to do stupid things while I 'm trying to watch YouTube. I don't have a laptop or tablet, and I wouldn't have one of these if the girls hadn't insisted that I get one back in '09. Now, I won't even wear a shirt that doesn't have a pocket for my phone.
I still don't carry a cell phone on a regular basis. I have a flip phone for when I travel, but otherwise, I'm incommunicado. My kids wanted me to get one and I told them nope. "But, Dad, what if there's an emergency?" Honestly, in my entire life there has been, like 4 emergencies and in all of those cases, me getting there sooner would've made no difference in the outcome.
Back in the day, my gramma (the Jello Mistress) helped organize the telephone operator's union in Pittsburgh in the '20s. She used to proudly boast of the death threats made against her. My mother-in-law was an operator in Cleveland in the '40s. My sister-in-law was an overseas operator in the '80s and had friends all over the world long before the Internet made such things possible.
I miss operators, too. And dialing for the time. And dialing for the temperature.
Has anyone seen the most recent phone book?It's so tiny and thin that it looks like a comic book "annual".I remember they used to be as thick as a Sears catalog and it would actually stop a bullet if you tried to shoot through it.
In the early80s if you wanted a phone in your car you could get one through Lorain Telephone Co . You needed a land phone in their system and have it installed by Lorain Electronics and have it working through their Ship to Shore Great Lake System.It was very expensive and was billed to your monthly account . I knew one person that had it.
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