Nov. 13, 2019
Remember these?
First off, I am not a hoarder. In fact I am minimalist. But for some reason I felt compelled to fish this dial phone out of the trash bin at the McCleary Community Center in 1978 when some family member decided it was worthless during the sale of my grandmother's estate. She was born in Centralia in 1891 and died at St. Pete's in 1978.
Every now and then I will dial the extinct line just to hear that old clickety-click of the rotary dial, and remember.
McCleary was ahead of the rest of Grays Harbor County when the town was the first to have rotary phones. The downside was that after 2 or 3 minutes (I cannot recall which) a polite tonal interruption would intrude and say that time is up. Only long distance calls had unlimited time. Local calls, many of them on party lines, had only whispy windows of times to communicate.
McCleary at that time had it's own phone company and the local phone book was so thin that even Caspar Milquetoaste could rip it in half.
