I remember as a child we had a party line telephone... no dial, just a crank to get the lady on the switchboard to come on the line and complete the call for us.
The first thing you did was to pick up the phone and listen to see if anyone else in your party was on the line talking.
If there was, you just hung up the phone.
If the line was free, you cranked the phone and the operator came on the line with "How may I direct your call".
As a child remember once seeing that a neighbor had a bottle with chocolate milk and mentioned it to Pop. My birthday was the following week; for that delivery, and from time to time after that, Pop made sure there was chocolate for me.
Most towns had a drive-in movie theater for us teenagers to enjoy with our dates. Phone numbers had four digits. A TV repairman would come to your house and replace blown tubes. Gas stations were service stations that filled your tank, cleaned your windshield, checked your oil, and sometimes checked the air in your tires. I know...I'm old.
I remember a small grocery store in the Bronx when I was a kid,in the 1950's.
The owner would sit behind the counter smoking a cigar.
He would lay a paper grocery bag on the counter, and on it he would write the prices of what you were buying. He would then add them up, without an adding machine,. He would double check his work by adding the same column of numbers from bottom to top (as I was being taught to do in school at the time) and then enter the total into a mechanical cash register
After you paid, he put the groceries in the bag and handed them to you
🤔.........I remember when my grandmother would give me a $1.00 bill and I would ride my bike down to the small corner store and buy a loaf of bread and a gallon of milk and I would get change back and my Grandmother would let me keep the change.
In college, I worked part time for the campus switchboard where we directed calls by inserting cables into the relevant slots on the board…like you see in very old movies. “One moment, please…”
