It's funny (funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha)

...how some facts stick in the brain and others don't. Take addresses, for example. I know that my aunt lived at 405 West Avenue in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, before moving to 403 Linden St. and I know that her telephone number was TUrner 6-9280 before there was ever such a thing as an area code. She has been dead since 1987.

My grandfather lived at 321 Runnymede Avenue in Jenkintown for many years before moving to my uncle's house at 325 West Avenue, a block from my aunt. My grandfather died in 1970 and my uncle died in 1983.

I remember that after Mama, Daddy, and I moved from 61 Larch St. in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, to Fort Worth, Texas, on a train (it took three days) in August 1947 (I was six), we stayed for a few days at the Majestic Hotel, then rented some rooms in the Arlington Heights section of the city, and eventually rented a whole house at 2332 Chandler Drive East. Had we stayed there, I would have eventually graduated from Paschal High School, but we didn't stay there. A few months later my parents bought an old house on three acres of land outside of Mansfield, Texas (population 774). Our address was Route 1, Box 59. A few years later, without ever having moved an inch, the countyside around Mansfield had grown so much that our address was changed to Route 1, Box 92.

Our first telephone in Mansfield was mounted on the wall and did not have a dial. It was equipped with a hand-operated crank on the side to ring the operator, who completed the connection through, I suppose, a switchboard. Our number was 157J-3. The -3 meant that because we were on a "party line" of at least eight families the indication of an incoming call to our house was three short rings. That operator really earned her money. The telephone company eventually replaced the crankbox on the wall with a phone that sat on the desk; it had a handset we picked up to talk through and listen with but it didn't have a dial. The operator came on the line when a person lifted the handset from its cradle and would complete the connection. Eventually we got still another telephone with both a handset AND a rotary dial. Our telephone number was not nearly as long as my aunt's TUrner 6-9280, no sir, it was short and sweet, 4726. As fans of Hee-Haw will remember, that is an even shorter phone number than Junior Samples had (BR549).

Nowadays we enter numbers into our smartphone's directory and just press the name of the person we want to reach. Or we can simply say, "Siri, call Grandma." As a result, I don't know anyone's telephone number any more.

We've come a long way, baby.

I think.

In the U.S., people say "Hello?" but in the U.K. they say "Are you there?" (or used to). Someone I know used to say "It's your nickel, start talking" and someone else said simply "Speak." It takes all kinds.

I will now close this fascinating post (I can hear you yawning) by telling you the first words spoken into a telephone mouthpiece, according to what I read. In a demonstration to others of his new invention, Alexander Graham Bell said to his assistant, Thomas A. Watson, who was in another room, "Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you." It happened in Boston, Massachusetts, on March 10, 1876.