From Okie Without Borders. Growing up Okie in L A.

A few years ago after my dad’s passing in 2007, one of the many things we siblings had to close out on was canceling my late dad’s phone number and service.  Phone number and service he and our mom have had originally setup back in 1948.  Their first phone service they had arranged with Pacific Bell Telephone Company and were then assigned an alpha/numeric dialing code known as a phone number. 

The phone number consisted of a name and a number.  The prefix was Union.  Union 1-5378.  The telephone company thought it might be easier back then for phone customers to remember long phone numbers if placing a named prefix in front of the numeric suffix.  Thus not needing to remember a long complicated string of numbers.  It was so easy.  So what had to be done when dialing was just dial U N 1 5 3 7 8.  Only dialing the first two letters in the word prefix.  Get it?

Now Of course, where my mom and dad originally came from back in Oklahoma, all they had to do when making a phone call was just pick up the phone receiver and crank the handle.  Then ask the telephone operator at the phone office in town to connect to Aunt Minnie’s residence.  So the phone operator just plugged in the right connecting cord plug to the right hole and Aunt Minnie’s phone rang.  But so did a half dozen other phones ring at the same time on her party line.  However, Aunt Minnie had a special assigned ring.  Two shorts and a long ring.  Designating this call is only for Aunt Minnie.  Oh, really?  However that only worked if a phone system had only a hundred or two phone customers.  But when my mom and dad moved out to Los Angeles, the phone numbers increased by several million.  Necessitating the caller to dial multiple numbers to reach the right party.  Making it more complicated.  Just too many numbers to remember.  Therefore coming up with the prefix/suffix system.  Get it?

Never the less back in Los Angeles, when we all moved a few years’ later about three miles eastward in 1954 our phone number prefix changed to Parkview.  So it was Parkview 1-5378.  Or, PA 1 5 3 7 8 and keeping the original subsequent numbers. 

Then when the sixties came Parkview was converted to all digits and phone dialing became a numeric system.  721-5378 had remained my mom and dad’s phone number until their recent passing.  Finally saying goodbye to the old family phone number.  It was so sad to see those numbers go away after being in the family so long.

Now backing up a few decades and going back to the early 1950s.  Inside our little East Los Angeles adobe house on Simmons Avenue, we had one phone.  A black clunky mechanical rotary dialing instrument with a large heavy hand receiver.  Probably weighing about twenty pounds or so.  And all attached to the wall by a six foot hard-wired fabric bound cord.  It was constructed from a black primeval Western Electric Bakelite plastic.  The large double bell ringer could be heard five doors down from our adobe home. 

But anyway, our single phone was located in a small breakfast nook adjacent to our smallish grease laden kitchen.  A place where you could either cooks while you talk or talk while you cook.  Whichever.  Certainly not centrally located but it seemed to work for all of us at that moment.

Nonetheless, as a naïve Okie youngster, I don’t remember ever answering or dialing the phone.  Maybe once or twice but not more than that.  Can’t remember.  This was back at my tender age of six or seven.  I was not sufficiently schooled to confidently operate the talking device.  I felt it my mom’s duty to operate the phone.  I would certainly back away from it when it rang loudly.  Answering and dialing was above my pay grade.

Later, and without too much warning, we Okies all moved into the postmodern world.  Acclimating and upgrading our social skills.  Being the sophisticated Okies that we were, my mom and dad surmised it was time to relocate my oldest sister out of the second bedroom.  A tiny room, which also was occupied, by my youngest sister and older brother.  Three siblings in one dinky bedroom was not practical for good brother-sister harmony.  By the way, I myself was bedded down at that time in a small daybed in my mom and dad’s room.  Which is a story for another time. 

But anyway, my parents decided to move my older sister to the breakfast nook, which was veiled off with a heavy upholstery fabric Curtin.  She was rapidly becoming a teenager and needed her space and privacy.  She was noticeably becoming different than my younger sister.  Meaning, you could see freckles all over my older sisters body.  If you know what I mean.  So, she was moved to her own digs in the nook.

Now this is where trouble began.  You had here teen girl, telephone arms length away, and a heavy opaque privacy curtain.  What were my mom and dad really thinking?  It all started with a missing movable phone taken from the kitchen counter.  Took by a freckled hand and drawn quickly behind the privacy Veil.  Then there were low hushed secretive pig Latin phrases separated now and then with long pauses and rapid breathing.  Breathing with frequent gasps and quivering whispers.  This is not to mention nervous anxious feet stuck up in the air occasionally pounding on the nook wall while steeped in unintelligible communication.  And how did I know this?  My younger sister and I just happened to be outside the privacy veil on a few whispering occasions.  Just minding our own business of course.  Yeah right.

But the big and little of it all was, my older sister’s behavior Certainly had become the prototype model for today’s mumbling, messaging, texting, twittering, facebooking, and 24/7 totally connected teenager.  A teenager intent on covert communications.  A teen information exchange made away from prying adult ears and eyes.  Yes, my older teen sister started it all.

“Tell mom about this today and you’ll be chicken fried snake tomorrow,” I’m sure my sister said back then to me.  lol & grins 4 all.  Thanks for calling and goodbye.  Click!  Buzzzzzzzz.