home » stories » by mesearch within stories
Family Stories
A potpourri of stories about various family members or events
First Call Answered
Have you ever seen or used a telephone similar to what is shown below? Your answer is strongly correlated to your age.
1949 BellSystems "500" series desk telephone
This is the type of phone that my family had when we lived in a trailer set in the farmyard of my grandparents, Jesse and Edna Hibbard. See this story for more information about living there. We lived in this trailer, shown below, until I was 5.5, or August 1963, when our new home was completed.
Our trailer in about December 1960, with the machine shed on the left. Al and Lou are shown.
I had watched how my mom picked up the phone after it rang, talked into the bottom mouthpiece of the handset, and then replaced the handset back into the cradle when done. I remember the first time I answered the phone by myself. It was a sunny, warm day, likely late spring, summer, or early fall. I was about 4, so likely in 1962. I knew that Mom was outside on some task. I heard the phone ring, and I noticed that Mom didn't hear the ring, so I picked up the handset. I answered with "Hello", and the other party asked if my mother was there. I then said that I would get her, and I put the phone back to get her.
Upon finding my Mom, I told her that someone called on the phone and wanted to talk to her. She came into the trailer, noticed the phone's handset in its cradle, and then she asked if there was a call. She asked why I had hung up the phone (actually, likely not using that language since "hung up" came with the next generation of phone, where we literally hung it up into a vertical cradle). I shrugged my shoulders and said that I thought that was what we did when done talking (since I was). At this point, I realized that there was a detail that I had missed. I don't recall if my mom was mad at me (or I conveniently have forgotten), but likely she was patient with me since it was my first time answering the phone.
I don't recall what happened next. Maybe the calling party gave me her name, and my mom called her back. Or maybe Mom just waited for the person to call back since the caller surely knew I had mistakenly hung up prematurely. Either way, things did work out, and I learned more completely how to answer the phone.
Published 2026-01-26.
If you find any errors in the text, please let me know. Thanks. Contact me with errors or comments using hibbardac@gmail.com. [Back to the top] [About the author, Al]
Binary Birthday Blastlisting of family stories by me Name Continuity