Tuesday, March 08, 2011

Oh O

This was Mom&Dad's home in Lehigh; for me 5th,6th&7th grades.  It was new when we moved-in with white wooden siding.  There were 4 rooms - in the front was the living room with the bedroom on the right & in back the kitchen area with a side entrance to the driveway on the left and a bathroom. Maybe there was a bedroom closet, too.  It had a coal-fired, pot-bellied stove which only heated the kitchen area.  One winter morn I went to Mom saying I couldn't make my bed; overnight condensation had formed, ran down & froze my bedding to the wall. SO Mom bought themselves an electric blanket and that's how I got their heating-pad.
What was really unique was we had a telephone - a rotary-dial, party-line with a real operator. The prefix was POrter 8 (ie dial 768). It was new to me.  SO, one of first times I answered it, I told an older lady she had misdialed & she says don't get smart with me & hung-up.  The phone rings again & I answer, this time the same old lady accuses me of answering the wrong phone.  The third time, I let Mom get it - apparently the lady was dialing a number with a zero and dialing the 6 which was the "O".  She didn't use the zero because that was the Operator.
By the way, an original trailer for Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder shows a rotary-dial with only MN on the number 6 because some would dial a 6 for the Operator.