The all-neighborhood telephone

When I was a youngster, my father purchased a Telephone and we were the first family in our neighborhood to have a real, live, installed telephone. Word that the Hatch’s had a telephone quickly spread throughout the neighborhood.  Because of this “firstness” our Telephone soon became an all-neighborhood telephone.

It all began several days after the installation when a neighbor appeared at our front door and said in an embarrassed, humble voice, “I have a real emergency, may I use your phone?”  A day or two later a different neighbor also had an emergency and wanted to use our phone. The number of emergencies increased daily along with requests to use our telephone to solve such emergencies.  Since there was a strong tradition in the West of helping “neighbors in need,” and since my mother would never refuse to help anyone, the answer was always “certainly”.

Soon after, all of our neighbors that used our home phone, started to inform a few of their friends and family that they could be reached in emergencies by calling a certain telephone number. That number was of course, ours.   We started to receive telephone calls requesting to talk to Sybil Jones.  Sybil lived two houses down the street.  Mother would always reply, “Hold on, I’ll go and get Sybil. The number of phone calls to and from our single phone soon reached record setting numbers. We should have been  awarded the “Ma Bell” plaque for the highest number of “to & from” phone calls through a single phone.

This hugh increase in the number of telephone calls handled required my Mom to hire a runner to take messages to and from other homes in the neighborhood.  I was that runner. I was delighted.  I was now being paid 10 cents a week to rush to a neighbors house and inform them that they were wanted on the phone.  I used this 10 cents to buy a ticket to the Saturday matinee at the local theater.  I suggested to Mom that we should charge a small fee for the use of our Neighborhood telephone.  My reasoning was that I could then receive 20 cents a week which would enable me to buy a bag of popcorn when I was at the weekly matinee.  Mom vetoed my suggestion.

Evidently she was right.  Our neighborhood phone operation continued for only a few months.  By increasing the volume of phones being produced and decreasing the cost of phones and service, more telephones began to appear in our neighborhood.  The market for an all-neighborhood service disappeared.

 Even though the life of this business enterprise was very brief, it still deserves to be listed on the list of great businesses that developed from the invention of the telephone.  I believe that this is the reason the latest telephone is called the “Smart Phone.”