The Old Brown Telephone

We had an old Kellogg Walnut Wall phone hanging on the wall in the living room when I was a kid.

We had a Haigler party line with Herman Whites, Jake Walls, Fred Walls, George Walls, Fred Zueges, Manuel Biers, Vester/Floyd Crabtrees, Herb Reicherts (or John Millers), Marvin Mills, Bill Zueges. Charles Workman.

The original phone lines were built by farmers in the community who formed a company and bought all the poles, lines and insulators needed to string lines from Haigler through the north part of Cheyenne County, Kansas. My grandpa, Frank Crabtree was one of the original share holders of that company. There was another line on the west side of Hiway 27. The two lines together with other sections of telephone lines set up the telephone company in Haigler and set up the office and switchboard to service those people around Haigler.

The telephone lines were strung on telephone poles that stood along all the country roads. The neighbors had ownership and maintained the lines whenever the weather would blow them down or tangle them. There was a glass insulator on each pole for each line strung on it. These insulators kept the lines from shorting out on the poles. The lines had to be kept fairly tight between the poles so they didn’t get to “singing” in the wind.

Everyone had a different “RING”. Ours was 2 longs and 1 short. Whenever anyone on your party line received a phone call, everyone heard it ring. It was a very restrained person who didn’t go over and pick up the receiver and listen in on the conversation. My Mamma called it “Rubbernecking.” Of course, each phone that came off the hook, made it harder and harder to hear the person on the other end of the call. You sometimes had to shout into the receiver to be heard. To this day, my Mamma still raises her voice and talks different than “normal” when she talks on her cell phone!

In Haigler, there was a “Central”, as we called the lady who took all the calls and hooked you up to the person you wanted to talk to. The Telephone Office was on the corner of what is now known as Noble Street and Main Street (Porter Avenue). You would put the receiver to your ear and wind the crank on the right side of the big brown wooden box, one LONG ring and Central would answer, “Number Please” and I would say, “I want to talk to my Grandma Crabtree”, and she would hook me up to my grandma! Of course, we did have real telephone numbers. Ours ended in 21, but don’t remember the rest of it…. Something like Normandy 21??

Whenever the telephone would ring, my Mamma would put her right hand over her heart, just hoping that whoever was calling wasn’t bringing bad news. In those days, we didn’t use the telephone to just chat or call for no reason. (Well, maybe some people did, but my mamma wasn’t one of them).

One of the coolest sights I remember is rows of birds sitting on the telephone wires and singing their hearts out!

We still had that big brown telephone when I was a teenager and began dating a boy from North Platte, who had a “private line”. ( I thought he was rich). When he would call, I just knew everyone was listening!! And they probably were.

Sometime before we left home, we got a NEW telephone. It was a black desk phone with a crank where the dial should be. We still had to ring central the same way we had with the big brown phone, but there was a handset with the earpiece and the mouthpiece all in one. I can remember when Leone would get phone calls from Norm Beeson, the boy she was dating at the time. Our brother, Dick, would stand behind her and belch really loud so Norm would think it was her. Is it any wonder that all four of us girls would chase him down and sit on him?!!!

It was along about that time that we got a South Haigler, Kansas telephone number: 913-298-3319. I can remember, when calling home, trying to explain that phone number to the OPERATOR (as we now called CENTRAL) when explaining how to dial it. She would insist that the area code should be 308 if the town was Haigler. Boy, did I get frustrated trying to get her to understand that we LIVED in Kansas, area code 913, but our telephone was out of Haigler, Nebraska.

Telephone life became a lot easier when everyone had their own phone number and you didn’t have to use the operator to make the phone calls for you anymore. Then when the car phones came along, it was great to have one to talk on when you were traveling down the road.

Who would ever have imagined in those days of crank phones that we would each carry our own phone around in our pocket and be able to call anywhere in the country for one monthly fee AND text message AND get email AND keep a memo log AND contact information AND an alarm AND a hundred other options that I don’t know how to use and previously kept in my head!!