I'm thinking about getting a new phone one of these days.
My family has been suggesting that for quite some time, since my aging flip phone won't do some of the things our younger family members like to do. For example, my phone can't receive pictures, doesn't receive group texts, doesn't access the Internet, doesn't do email, does make pictures but can't send them to someone else, along with certain other inconveniences. When I do a text, it takes me longer to write it, because I don't have a keyboard. I have to push the buttons a certain number of times to get the right letters and to go to a special screen to get punctuations. A few days ago I was trying to text chat with some technical people about a computer problem, and they kept sending me texts every 10 seconds asking me if I was still there, that I had been idle so long they were going to close the connection on me. Well, I was just trying to tap out my message to describe my problem. We gave up before I ever was able to describe my situation.
Some time ago I was leading a Sunday School devotional time when my phone began to ring. I pulled it out of my pocket to shut it down, (I had forgotten to shut it off or to silence it beforehand), when I noticed that the young people who were there were whispering among themselves that "He has a flip phone! He has a flip phone!"
I guess only ancient codgers like me still have flip phones. OK, I am getting to be pretty ancient, and I still have a flip phone! Oh well, in my lifetime I have become outmoded many times, updated to the new technologies, and likewise witnessed that even what was new became old and outmoded in time. I actually didn't expect that flip phones would become outmoded this soon. After all, Captain Kirk and Spock and Scotty and Doc and Ahura and everybody on Star Trek had these flip-type communicators even while they were driving the Enterprise over to visit other galaxies, jousting with the Romulans and the Klingons, and traveling at Warp 2 or Warp 3.
Today, we were visiting over lunch with friends Charlie and Virginia Moon, and at one point we were talking about the changes we have seen over the years with phones. It is easy for us older people to remember when if people had phones at all, they were the party-line phones of the early 20th century. In those days, your phone was a wooden box on the wall with a mike that extended out of the center for you to speak into, and a wired ear speaker that you took off the hook and held over your ear. Everybody had a certain "ring" which might be two longs and a short, or a long, a short, and a long, or three longs, and so on. To "ring up" someone on the line, you turned the crank on the right side of the box, say a couple of turns for a "short" and three or four times for a "long." In many of the old systems the call would make the phones ring at every house on the party line, but you knew to only answer when it was "your ring." Of course in those days there were many listener-in-ers, who would pick up their receivers, especially if they knew who was receiving the call, hoping to hear some interesting gossip on the line.
My own family didn't have a phone at all during the party line days. We actually got a TV before we had a phone. When we did get these new uptown things we got updated pretty quickly.
Televisions began to be sold in our area about 1951. We bought our first television set when we moved into our new farmhouse in 1953. A year later, Mr. Floyd Wilson in Pea Ridge established the Pea Ridge Telephone Company, and we signed up for a telephone on the farm. Those were really uptown phones, black phone sets that sat on a table, with a receiver with the ear part on one end and the speak-in-to-it mike on the other, and on the desk unit was the dial you twirled to call people. People then began to have phone numbers. I hear that some young people today wouldn't know how to dial someone on those old phones.
Interestingly, we still use the dialing terminology with our cell phones, even though we aren't really "dialing," we are pushing buttons. But my cell phone screen informs me when I have put in a number and hit the green button to activate the call that it is "dialing" the number for me. I don't really see any dialing about it. In the old days, the dialing was done, then came the ringing. But, I guess phones normally don't "ring" today, they have music that plays, or truck horns that sound, or recorded words that call us to answer the phone. We have gone back to having everybody have their individual "rings," except that they aren't really rings, even though we may say that we have a custom "ring." Once upon a time, a phone was a phone, a camera was a camera, an adding machine was an adding machine, and a radio was a radio.
Today a phone is a phone and a camera and a calculator and a radio and a TV and a computer and a social media instrument, and who knows what all else depending on what "apps" you have installed. What a world! I guess I do need a new phone! Maybe a "smart one"?
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Editor's note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge and an award-winning columnist, is vice president of Pea Ridge Historical Society. Opinions expressed are those of the writer. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.