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Welcome back to the GVS world of the rotary telephone. In my last post I introduced you to the Western Electric Model 500. Today I get my hands on one, for real.

Whenever I research a cool piece of vintage stuff like this, I’m itching to give the tech a try. Usually I am disappointed but not this time… well, sort of. My current house was built in the early 70s. Some things have changed in the intervening decades, but one thing has not. This rotary phone, still mounted on the wall in my laundry room.

When I first picked up the handset there wasn’t any dial tone. I just heard a strange buzzing noise.

I wondered if that meant there might be some life in the old guy yet. Then I went to get my phone service hooked up and discovered that, at least in Portland, there are not many land lines anymore. Most are cellular, even for home phones. They gave me a wireless router and told me not to use the jacks on the floor. The original phone lines still run through the house, but they sit idle. They are not needed for a phone call anymore.

Neither, really, is my wall unit, but I’m so glad the previous owner never removed it. Now I don’t hear anything at all when I pick up the handset, not even a buzz, but the dial still turns and makes a click-click noise as it spins back into place.

What fun!

It’s also good to compare the actual dial to the diagram in another booklet I found, “We Learn about the Telephone.”

In this illustration you see the dial started at 1 on the top right, and then the numbers circled around until you got to 0 on the lower right. But this number 0 is different from the letter O you find in hole 6, which also stood for MNO if you were dialing a letter. The number 0 at the end was reserved to contact the operator. Easy access to good service. It was also easy to mix up the letter I and the number 1, so the booklet warned about that too.

I don’t remember how I learned to use the rotary phone, but I sure remember using it. My folks had a custom home built in 1970 and they made sure it came with a special feature, modular phone plugs. I wish I had a picture, but who would think to take a photo of a plug? Anyway, I recall that it was a white, cube-like block of plastic, which was stuck to the end of the phone cord and had several gold prongs sticking out the bottom. A similar cube was in the floor of every room, with corresponding holes. With this attachment you could easily plug or unplug your phone and move it to any room in the house.

This came in handy to my teenaged self when I was able to convince my mother to plug one extension into my room. A luxury back then.

Of course not not so luxurious when you had to sit close to the plug. The wire would only stretch so far. Although, now that I think of it, I seem to recall having a super long phone extension line that let me carry my phone all across the living room, but that came much later.

I’m pretty sure the cord is what doomed the Model 500. People like to sit comfortably when they dial. You can’t really do that while holding the wired handset of your rotary phone, which is bolted to the wall next to your utility sink.

Still, some other lessons from early phone usage remain. My brochure had a whole section on telephone manners, which included what to say if you dialed a wrong number, or if you were taking a message. Politeness was the key.

One thing that is long gone, thank goodness, is the “party line.” In the early days of the telephone, many homes shared a line to reduce costs or individual lines weren’t available. Anyone with a phone connected to the line, could hear any conversation going on. Therefore another whole set of manners was required so you could be a “good telephone neighbor.”

The pamphlet suggests that the first step in good party line behavior is to be ready to share. Always hang up right away if you hear someone speaking. Also hang up promptly if someone needs to make an emergency call. When you make several calls in a row, it’s good etiquette to wait in-between each one to see if anyone else wants to use the line. Finally, one had to remember that, even if you ever had a personal line, the person you were calling may have to share, so it always pays to be a good phone neighbor.

My mom remembered having a party line when she was a kid. I remember growing up with one line and one phone. Then came the 21st century, along with beepers, then fax machines and cell phones, all requiring their own number.

Now we have three phone numbers in our household and when I had a WiFi hotspot we had four.

A lot has changed since the Model 500 swept through the telephonic scene, but one thing remains the same, there’s nothing better than hearing the voice of someone you love, either in person, or through the earpiece of a telephone.

Another Glorious Piece of Vintage stuff!