Remember Your First Home Phone Number?

Our first number was a 7 digit in the city, but when we moved to the country, we had a party line. And we live at the corner of 3 different exchanges, so everything was long distance, even the houses on both sides of us. It was the reason we never got calls from our friends in town. Now, if you got to town and wanted to call someone in town, you went to the pay phone in the park and dialed the last 4 numbers of their phone number, free of charge. They only charged you .10c if you dialed anything that didn’t have the towns prefix numbers. So we just waited till we got to town to call anybody. We hitch hiked everywhere we went as teenagers, sometimes going to town and back 3-4 times a day. Someone would always pick you up, and you knew who was going where, and when. Farmers going to Aunt Bettys for their breakfast “meeting” at 6am, folks going to work or coming home....you just walked up to the road and in a few minutes of their scheduled passing, there they would be. That was back when you could just hop in the bed of Mr. Wylie’s truck and get where you were going. Probably a ticket now, to save us from ourselves!