In the mid 60s, it cost me a $10 roll of quarters to call my g/f and talk for 30 minutes, at a time when I was only making about $100 per month (Military).
I remember reading back in the 1980s, before the rise of ubiquitous cell phones, that if the phone technology of that time (1980s) was the technology of the 1940s, that it would take every female in the country to be telephone operators simply to keep the phone conversations connected.
Oh, and where we were stationed in Japan in the 60s, it took $3 a minute, 24 hours advance notice, and at least three operators (Japanese, LD, and Pennsylvanian), to have a conversation with our Philly-suburb family, and that was when base gas was 15 cents a gallon.