CLinton - 77279

Most of my friends in high school wouldn’t call my house for fear my father would answer the phone.  My dad was unaware how enraged and belligerent he sounded because it was so intimidating no one ever had the balls to ask, “What’s your fucking problem?”  It was all a misunderstanding.  I never let on to anyone how kind and gentle my dad was because it was too much fun having them think he was a capo in the cosa nostra.  Had he known how terrifying he came across over the phone he would have been embarrassed.

It all stemmed from my dad viewing a ringing telephone the same as a home invasion robbery.  My parents kept to themselves at home and never entertained a group of people in our home – not once, ever.  There were never more than a handful of times within any given year when an old friend of my parents or a couple might stop by but it was very rare.  I was perfectly happy with the situation - my friends did not come to my house, I always went to theirs.  Despite being an only child I never was at a loss for companionship.  There simply weren’t any kids that I knew that were as interesting to be with as my parents.

With my mother it was mainly an endless variety of books she brought home from working at the library or the bookstore.  Her work demanded that she kept pace with what was in vogue at the time but in addition she could never resist anything written on bizarre topics such as Roswell, New Mexico; area 51; paranormal phenomena and pills that turned tap water into gasoline.  

My dad migrated through a series of projects and hobbies including gems and minerals, origami, mountaineering, telescopes, making jewelry and  prospecting to name a few.  The living room was where he designed various equipment and machines he would build from scratch in either our garage or basement including a go cart, rock polisher, diamond saw, telescopes, telescope lens grinder, ice axes, crampons, power slush boxes and a river dredge for finding gold.

The living room was where my parents listened to their collection of vinyl 78 rpm jazz records from the 1920s through the 1940s 

Photo from cdandlp.com

and where we often sat in the dark with our manually operated slide projector, viewing slides taken on our desert and high sierra trips.

Photo from tias.com

The living room was also the spot where marathon card and board games were held.  We would compete exclusively at a single game such as cribbage, Yahtzee or Monopoly for somewhere between several days and several weeks until none of us could stand it any longer.  When the game had run its course it was discarded and never revisited.  Our house served as our refuge, insulated and cut off from the rest of the world where it was just the three of us.  It couldn’t have felt more secure if it had a moat and a drawbridge.    

We had only the one phone which was located in the dining room a good 25 feet from the living room where my dad would be when he was at home.  If my dad answered the phone, it meant that he would have to not only interrupt what he was doing, but also have to get up from the couch, and travel to the dining room, climbing up two stairs along the way.  If he had been watching television, since remotes didn’t yet exist, he had already been up and down countless times to change channels even though there were only seven to pick from. 

This was back in the days before cell phones, answering machines and voice mail existed.  It was also prior to the introduction of area codes in the mid 1950s.  Phone numbers came with a two-digit prefix which represented a geographic area.  Our prefix was “CL” which was short for “Clinton” and indicated that the first two numbers were first a 2 and then a 5.  When you told someone your phone number, you would say, “Clinton, 7-7-2-7-9.”  Evidently seven numbers was more than could be expected for a mere human to handle and the prefix supposedly made the task more manageable.  Phones were the bulky rotary dial type, came in black with a receiver you held in one hand to listen and talk into that was attached by a short cord to a second part that had a dial with ten finger holes in it for making outgoing calls.  The phones were made of a heavy solid plastic that gave off a petroleum scent when you had the receiver up close to your face.  

Photo from 123rf.com

Extension chords were available but this was not an option.  If our house represented to my dad a private estate, then the living room was the inner sanctum and no telephone would ever be allowed to violate this sacred place.

Then of course there were those occasions when my dad went to all the trouble to get to the phone, answer it sounding like a psychopath only to have the horrified caller hang up without a word.  God forbid the caller who hung up, figuring they had miss-dialed, would try calling back after taking time for their nerves to settle, this time making certain to dial the right number.  The time required for the caller to recover their composure and then carefully redial would be just enough to allow my dad to return to the living room, sit back down, and re-engage in what ever he had been doing.  By the time my dad got to the phone for the second time, the unsuspecting caller would be greeted by fulminate of mercury.