[pandemoniumreigns]

"In the 1960s, our phone in rural Iowa was on a party line. There was a crank handle on the phone to ring the attention of the operator."

When I was a kid in a small Alaskan village, we had the old crank type wall phones too, but no operator. Every house had their own ring kind of like morse code, Three shorts and a long or two longs two short etc.

Also, wern't there a lot of ways to beat the phone co. in Abbey Hoffmans "Steel this book". A friend of mine used one of those tricks using the payphone at school and got to a hotel in Manhatten.

[Eric in the Ozarks]

Our phone worked the same way but we cranked one long to get the operator. There was no dial tone and no way to place a call.

On another note, I recall reading about a prankster who discovered that a particular whistle in a box of breakfast cereal could “tweet” through AT&T's safeguards. Free long distance was really free...