sara, could you get me the dinner...
just brought 2my attention that 1/2 of posters here don't know what a "long distance call" is...
- Thread starter CockofEarle
- Start date
When I first lived in France ( a while back), one made a long distance phone call by going to the local office of the PTT. An official there would put the call through, and buzz a little phone cabinet where you took the call. And it cost a fortune to boot.
Funny how you can remember things like that. If memory serves, at one time we called (and actually called it this) RA2-7681.
How about a collect call- remember that? You could refuse it too! And how about talking on a pay phone and the operator coming on the line to tell you to throw more change in the phone,
Our "Time-of-Day" number in Greenville (by the 60's) was 232-4611
I remember Grandma listening in on the party line. There was an art to listening in without getting caught.
When I first moved to rural SC, we had a rotery dial phone on a party line.
"Operator it's an emergency can you break into the call?.
BR549
(For those of you who are youngsters, that's the number to Junior Samples used car lot.)
(For those of you who are youngsters, that's the number to Junior Samples used car lot.)
"Operator". Love Croce....some unbelievable songs within a way too short amount of time.
WATS Line. "Wide Area Telephone Service". That's how my folks & I in G'ville got to talk to my bro' at his office in Cola. w/o Long Distance charges!!
We had a party line when I was really young. Thinking back on it that was nuts. My grandmother had a rotary dial up until the early 90s when the phone company made her remove it.
Craziest thing at my house was where I lived in Cash(between Society Hill and Cheraw). I could call Florence 35 minutes away and it was a local call but it was long distance to call Cheraw and it was 8 minutes away. Also we lived on the line between local and long distance. In our house and front yard was a local call but if you had a phone in our back yard it would have been long distance. Crazy. 
Or passing short messages through collect calls as your name. They had to start putting live operators on the line to keep it from happening. Ended up costing more to employ the operators than they lost on the collect calls.
