Close calls

A phone call remains among the most intimate forms of communication, even in the digital age

ewilliams@floridaweekly.com

When the heartbrokenken narrator of Chuck Berry’s 1959 song “Memphis, Tennessee” tries to reach a girl named Marie on the telephone in Memphis, he asks the disembodied voice of a long-distance telephone operator, then so familiar to callers, to connect his call on what was probably a rotary dial telephone. “Long-distance information…” Berry pleads. “Help me find the party trying to get in touch with me.” […]

In 1945, Southwest Florida resident Rob Kircher was born. He grew up in Rochester, N.Y., when switchboard operators like those Chuck Berry wrote about still connected local or long-distance calls by hand. Households typically only had one phone in the entrance hall that was used for limited purposes and not often by kids, Mr. Kircher remembers. His household had a “candlestick”-style phone with a separate earpiece. When you picked up the receiver you might hear some other household’s conversation on the then-commonplace “party line.” You had to wait until they hung up to make your call. […]

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