One key feature of our past year of pandemic life has been the ability of people to connect with one another via video calls through Skype, Apple FaceTime, Google Duo, Facebook Portal and the king of them all, Zoom. According to reports, people from the Boomer Generation have been some of the top users of the technology. Mister Boomer has recently become aware of some journalists expressing surprise at that fact, to which Mister B responds, “What??!!” Why wouldn’t boomers jump on a technology that helps them stay connected to family and friends? Certainly our history shows that boomers — the first television generation — embraced all sorts of communication technology in the height of our era.
For example, take long distance phone calling. It was, like many inventions, not a product of the boomer years, yet it became popular during the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. In fact, what was considered the first long distance phone call was placed in the late 1800s. By the 1920s, all areas of the country were connected to long distance lines (though not necessarily every city and town, let alone individual houses). Indeed, in the early days, long distance lines were separate from local call lines. Some areas required the caller to visit a specific location that was wired for long distance calling. All long distance calls were placed through one or more switchboard operators. The lack of availability, equipment needed and manual labor involved made long distance calling time-consuming and expensive.
That all began to change during the boomer years. Direct dialing became a reality in 1951, and by 1960, it was no longer necessary to contact a switchboard operator to place a long distance call. Direct dialing greatly improved access to the average caller for domestic long distance. International long distance through the Transatlantic Cable could be dialed directly to some locations by 1957. However, the entire international long distance system wasn’t completed until 1970.
In Mister Boomer’s own survey of boomer friends, two things come to mind regarding long distance calling in our era: our fathers complained about the cost, and families often used the Collect Call option. For many boomers, like the Mister Boomer household, there were not many reasons to make long distance calls. All of his family lived within a 30-mile radius, and there were no “old country” folks remaining overseas to call.
However, since long distance calling could be zoned within one’s own state, some boomer households had strict rules on when their long distance calls could be made (weekends only, when rates were lowest) and how long the conversation could last (usually less than three to five minutes, since charges increased after that).
It was the 1960s before second or third phones were installed in many boomer households. Bell telephone and ATT had specific marketing campaigns to encourage exasperated fathers to get their boomer daughters a Princess phone in their bedrooms. It’s an instance that clearly indicates how boomers embraced technology in their time.
Long distance calling had another option in the boomer years, and that was Collect Calling. Making a collect call meant reversing the charges. Since the operator was the go-between for the caller and receiver, and both would be on the line at the same time, boomer families constructed elaborate coded systems to relay needed information to a family member without actually having to connect and pay for the call. No one was fooled by refusing the charges, of course, but Mister B did know some fathers of boomers who were quite pleased with themselves for not incurring long distance charges on Collect Calls. For example, a boomer in the Army might be on the way home for leave. The soldier calls home and asks for his father to pay the charges. Once the father is connected and all parties are on the line, the soldier caller might then exclaim that he needs his father to accept the charges so he can be picked up at the bus station at 8:30, but the father, having heard this info, rejects the collect call. The operator then closes the call.
Today, boomers and everyone else regularly enjoy unlimited long distance calling, and can now place free limited-time video calls to family and friends, too. Boomers always did love a bargain, so of course they would embrace the technology. What Millennial mind would think otherwise?
What memories of long distance phone calling come to mind for you, boomers?
Not only were there long distance charges but near zone charges as well. Sometimes it cost extra to call from one suburb to the next even in the same metropolitan area. Those calls were to be avoided as well, or at least kept short. It was not until I saw my future brother-in-law call various auto parts stores to ascertain whether a certain part was in stock at that store did I realize that was even a possibility and that one could save time in the long run by ‘shopping over the phone’ rather than driving from one store to the next in search of a part.
Also, I noted that men of the previous generation, especially blue collar types, did not know how to use the phone as they never had experience using a phone. They did not grow up with a phone in the house and most did not use the phone at work. In fact a blue collar guy could not be called at work. Thus they saw the phone as a luxury and crabbed about it’s cost over the $3.00 a month minimum.