I‘m no red-diaper baby, but I grew up hearing lots of talk about the party line. This had nothing to do with politics. The party line was the phone line we shared with the neighbors — a rapidly dying practice, according to an article in USA Today. There are apparently only 5,000 of these multi-household phone lines left in the country, and they won’t be around much longer. But party lines were once a way of life for millions of (mostly rural) Americans. And before this venerable institution finally disappears, it’s worth pausing to remember . . . just how hideously awful it was.
The USA Today reporter paints a somewhat romantic picture: “Though the lines lacked privacy,” he writes, “they helped build a sense of community.” No, I’m sorry. This is like saying, Though the abandoned pickup trucks in my neighbor’s front yard were unsightly, they helped create valuable habitat for wild rodents. If your idea of “community” includes eaves-dropping, prying, and unusually authoritative gossip, then you should mourn the passing of the party line.
For the uninitiated, this is how it worked. The party line was a ploy by Ma Bell to make customers unhappy and thus willing to shell out for more expensive private service — to up-sell, as the marketers now say. The more neighbors you shared the line with, the cheaper your rates. As a Bell engineer wrote in 1899, the up-selling strategy “cannot be accomplished unless the service is unsatisfactory. It therefore requires that enough subscribers be placed on a line to make them dissatisfied and desirous of a better service.”
But Bell and its smaller rivals underestimated the willingness of people to put up with lousy service in order to save a buck. When I was a kid in backwater Indiana in the early 1960s, there were probably eight or ten families on our line. That went down to four by the time I was in high school, which was still three too many as far as I was concerned. Anyone on the party line could listen to anyone else’s calls, and often did.
Nowadays, if you call, say, your cable company to scream that your TV has flickered out just when Regis was about to ask the $ 250,000 question, you get put on hold and receive a recorded warning: “All our calls are monitored to ensure proper service.” Same thing if you happen to call a military office. Instead of hello, you are advised by Private Bailey: “This is not a secure line.” Try living this way on a daily basis. Such warnings — how to put this? — can inhibit a frank exchange of views. (I’ve always assumed, by the way, that no company actually monitors its calls to ensure proper service; they just want to intimidate their entry-level employees into a semblance of politeness. But that’s another rant.)
Of course, you never actually got a warning from your neighbors. At best, you might be put on notice by Mrs. Smith’s heavy breathing or Mr. Jones’s tobacco chewing. But you had to assume someone was listening all the time. You think you were nervous asking someone out on a first date? Try doing it with a heavy breather listening in. This is a recipe for a life-time of phone paranoia and self-consciousness.
For anyone who has ever lived with a party line, the first private line is one of those milestones of modernity, like indoor plumbing or central heating. Which is why we’re probably more astonished than most people to hear someone with a cell phone freely sharing her intimate conversation with a sidewalk full of strangers. The breach of manners is not what jars us; when we overhear a private phone conversation it seems not a novelty but a throwback — almost a willful rejection of progress. Like choosing to beat the dust out of your winter coat with a stick instead of sending it to the cleaners.
People basically had two approaches for coping with the party line. The well-behaved majority kept their calls brief and to the point. Assuming that anything they said might very well end up in the public domain, they led phone lives of impressive decorum. The others, like people today who heedlessly forward dirty e-mail jokes to everyone in their company (you know who you are), seemingly cared little for their public reputations. Indeed, there were more than a few provocateurs who enjoyed saying something outrageous whenever they heard the rattle of Miss Brown’s dentures. They knew she couldn’t utter a reproach without exposing herself as a snoop.
It’s a little-known fact that the highest rates of violence in America have traditionally been not in the city but in rural areas. Sociologists claim not to understand this, but I suspect they overlook the role of the party line.
RICHARD STARR
