Rotary Dial Telephone

If this sounds familiar, it’s because I posted it on another blog a while back. I ran across it today and wanted to re-share it with a few slight revisions:

I have nostalgic memories of our heavy old black rotary phone, which is what I remember using when I was young. A couple of years ago, I purchased a replica of a vintage rotary dial phone much like the one my family had when I was young. I looked on-line at authentic vintage phones, but most of the ones I saw looked too worn and dirty, and the restored phones cost too much for this purpose; so I decided to buy a replica instead. It’s clean and new, and it is supposed to be a working phone. I displayed the replica on top of a small heirloom accent table that Mother also used for this purpose.

Soon after I received the new old phone, my son Chris, his wife Heather, and their two children Blake and Reagan came to visit. Reagan, who was ten years old at the time, immediately asked about that odd looking thing in the hallway. When her mother and I explained to her what it was, she was even more curious. She wanted to know if it worked and how. I told her it was supposed to work but that I had not actually plugged it in to try it yet. I said we could test it while she was here, and the next thing I knew, we were doing just that. This demonstration of how to use a rotary phone was a very interesting exercise and oh-so-simple.

First, I found the cord that came with it and plugged it into the wall jack. One end fit perfectly into the wall jack, but the other end did not fit into the phone jack. After struggling with this for a while, Reagan said, “T-ma, maybe if we unplug the cord from here [HANDSET], it will fit into this one here [LINE].” At first I thought, “Well, that’s not going to work,” but I squinted to see the labels better on the underside of the phone, and it turned out that Reagan was right and that I had actually plugged the HANDSET cord into the LINE plug. I should not have doubted Reagan’s technological knowledge of this low-tech curiosity. I thanked her for fixing the problem, and we moved on to the next step.

Reagan wanted to dial her cousin in California, my granddaughter Ashlee (age 12). They were already FaceTiming each other on their iPads at that very moment, and Reagan’s iPad was sitting right next to the rotary phone. This was only one of the photo ops I missed during this demonstration. Fifteen hundred miles away, Ashlee sat and waited for Reagan’s call, as they remained connected on their iPads. Reagan put the handset to her ear and began dialing the number I had written on a piece of paper for her. This is a general recap of how this simple exercise went:

Me: Listen for the dial tone. Dial 1 first. Then the area code. Then the number…Ok, go…Put your finger in the finger hole for each number and slide your finger around the dial until your finger hits the stop….No, wait. Don’t take your finger out of the hole until it hits the stop…You’ll have to hang up and start over. What? Oh, ‘hang up’ means set the handset back on the cradle, which depresses the buttons and disconnects…Now be sure to dial all the way to where the finger-stop is…Good…Oops. Let the rotary dial go back by itself. Don’t keep your finger in it…Ok, do it again…Well, you waited too long between numbers…You’ll have to start over again…Your finger slipped…Do it again…Oh, the phone moved and your finger slipped again…Keep the phone still while you dial…Oh, me. You’ll have to start over….

We were all three giggling very hard very soon, which increased the difficulty factor for Reagan to complete the task; and Ashlee, who could hear us but not see us on her iPad, was still patiently waiting for her cell phone to ring.

This whole demonstration went on for at least thirty minutes. Reagan kept having to start over for various reasons. I didn’t remember there were so many things that could go wrong dialing a rotary phone. One problem was that the vintage phone replica isn’t as heavy as the real thing, and it kept sliding and throwing her off. Reagan’s mom Heather was sitting quietly nearby listening to our dialing frustrations. I am certain I heard her giggling more than once, usually after one of my repeated “This is my nightmare come true!” exclamations.

“OK,” I said, “Let me see if I can do it” and I started dialing it myself. I couldn’t do it either. This simple phone would not allow us to dial a long distance number.

So, I surrendered and asked Ashlee to call us, which worked like a charm; but after they talked for only a few seconds, they hung up and happily resumed talking with each other on their still-connected iPads.

We had fun. At least, I had fun. Reagan and Ashlee must be mystified by the simplicity of the rotary dial phone. They also probably both think that their T-ma is funny and that I was surely a child genius when it came to rotary phones.