I'll probably never get used to not having a land line. It's been a couple years since I finally had it disconnected, and I still miss it.
It was so convenient. I gave my land line number to all of the businesses and organizations that didn't require direct access to me during the day. When I got home from work, I called back anyone that left a message.
Getting rid of it (to save money) meant that I had to give everybody my cell phone number. That means I get calls all day at work. Hilariously, I had my own land line at work the year I started. But my employer got rid of them within my first year to save money.
One of the nice things about the good old days when everyone had a land line was that Lorain Telephone published a directory. Most everyone I know had a number that was listed. You didn't get crank calls back then. Spam was something Mom made sandwiches out of.
And in the 1950s, when Lorain was growing and Lorain Telephone was adding new interchanges, the company regularly published updates in the Lorain Journal with new telephone numbers. Below are the numbers that were published on June 29, 1950.
Miss Emma Miller, who taught fourth grade at Boone Elementary, and whose sister was the nurse at Admiral King, got her phone number then; the two of them lived across West 20th Street from Hawthorne, the best junior high in the whole city.
ReplyDeleteWe have a gizmo called a Cellular Home Base. It took the place of our land line, same number, tied to a non-mobile cell unit that you connect your regular telephone to. It doesn't receive texts, only calls, and won't take messages, you have to provide a machine for that. It's basically a land line you can take from place to place. Thing costs something like $15/month for unlimited calls on our mobile plan. It's cheaper than my flip-fone!
ReplyDeleteI don't recognize the Lorain Golf Range on Colorado Ave. Did you ever practice there, Dan?
ReplyDeleteHi Dennis! It looks like Lorain Golf Range didn't last very long. I checked my 1954 city directory and it was already gone from the listings, and its phone number was no longer in service. When I get to the library sometime, I'll see if I can find out how long it lasted.
DeleteYou can barely make it out on the 1952 aerial on HistoricAerials.com but you have to know what one looks like already. It's on the south side of Colorado Ave between Maine and Maryland Ave. A small building in the middle of a walkway.
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