When I was a young, precocious, probably not so well-behaved youngster, I often stayed with my grandmother while my mother and father worked. Every chance I got, when my grandmother wasn’t looking, I’d pick up the telephone and listen for voices. Back in the 50’s, most people had party lines, a telephone line that was shared between two or three people. I didn’t know it at the time, but it must have had something to do with the scarcity of phone lines. I loved that party line.

But here’s another point of view from a blog written by Gifford Neill

We could not get a private telephone line as there were not enough phone lines running up to East Hartland. So we had to get a party line, and the only catch was that there was a lady in town there who seemed to spend all her time on our phone line. I was forced to build a little battery operated phone line detector, that monitored wheter the line was busy or not. If it was busy, a red light would remail lit; when the lady hung up, you could hear the relay “click”, and the light would go out. I’d grab the phone quickly then, as that was my chance. This provoked the lady as she liked to make a series of long phone calls one after the other.

Anyway, as much as Mr. Neill hated his party line, I absolutely adored my grandmother’s. Of course, it took me a while to perfect the art of picking up the receiver very slowly so that the two people already using the line would be unable to detect my presence. You had to be careful not to breath into the phone, too, but sometimes the talkers still could sense another person on the line. I didn’t find out until much later that the extra line created a hollow sound, and that’s how I got caught on the line. Needless to say, I got shouted off the phone a lot, but sometimes the women were so involved in their conversation that I went undiscovered. What bliss! Listening to grown-up conversations. It was like stepping into another world.

It was good, that is, until my grandmother caught me. When she saw what I was doing, she’d do this outrageous, crazy dance, her arms flying wildly in the air, which translated into “hang up before I murder you.” If you assume that after I hung up, I received a thorough tongue-lashing from my grandmother, you’d be wrong. Oh, she took a shot at it, but it would go something like this. “I told you never to listen in on other people’s conversations. That’s a very, very bad thing to do. What did you hear?”

Yes, my grandmother was just as anxious to hear the neighborhood gossip as I was. Gosh, I loved that party line. Did you have one?

(For those people who are following the astrology articles I write for LifeScript.com, these are links to the Year of the Tiger, the Year of the Dragon and the Year of the Rabbit)