Gray Matters by Stuart Carlson and Jerry Resler for November 11, 2023

The first person to use the touchtone was JFK on April 22nd 1963 to launch the ground breaking for the 1964 World’s Fair in NYC. If you google it, you can find a video of it.

yeah Grey used to make carbon copies too.

I remember when they were all rotary, not when that changed.

When growing up our phone hung on the wall, had a crank and bells on top. A few years later we got a rotary phone. Way cool!

I remember when the new dial phones which the phone company installed shifted from operator service to dial service. Of course that was the eventual death knell for party lines and my Uncle’s 2 digit phone number. Still, it was a decade or more before a second switch was required at the exchange; until that time we only had to dial the last 4 digits of the number we wanted to connect with.

I live in the country and to have touch tone the area you lived in needed to offer touch tone service. We couldn’t get it for years after it came out. When we had new carpets put in the workmen got a great laugh out of our old dial phone on the wall.

Our next door neighbor retained their original AT&T phones until their deaths in 2010 & 2014.

A huge black telephone, made of a material of the weight and strength of a bowling ball.

When you picked up the handset (or horn) it must have weighed three pounds and could have been used for self defense (as the cord to the base and the base to the wall restricted your ability to sneak up on people).

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Ah the arrogance and naïveté of youth. What sonny boy doesn’t realizes that someday his kids will be mocking him.

I remember when you had to turn the crank to call the operator to connect you to your party.

A 16-key phone? I don’t recall ever seeing one of those (the fourth column of buttons was intended for controlling an on-phone dictation system, until someone realized that * and # would be adequate) outside of Bell Labs.