Life in the 70s: The Yellow Telephone

Remembrances from the Feral Generation

“You have bad phone behavior,” my husband Hugo said more than a little irritated. Earlier that day, as I was driving, I’d attempted to send an illegal text, thrown the phone down when the light turned green while Hugo continued to tell me about something important that had happened to him. As we whizzed along, I glanced down when I could. Did the text send? I couldn’t tell, but I realized words were dancing across the empty white space in the text box as Hugo continued his story.

“The phone’s recording!” I said, horrified.

He grabbed it. “You never turn this thing off,” he said, punching a button.

I nodded in agreement. It was true, but I dared not say a word because I was worried in turning the phone off he’d sent the text recording him. When we finally arrived home, I checked my texts. All good. It hadn’t sent so I deleted it.

My reckless behavior didn’t stop there. The next day, as I walked behind my mother leaving a doctor’s appointment, she shuffled, unsteady on her walker ahead of me. When the heavy glass doors automatically opened, I looked at my phone. The next thing I knew, I heard a man yelling, “Whoa!” as he jumped beside her to keep the doors from crushing her. Disaster barely averted again.

“Quit being a screenager,” my daughter Frances tells me too often for my own comfort as I fiddle with my cell phone ring set to “classic,” the same ring that punctuated my childhood days and sent me running to pick up the push button phone while I yelled, “I’ll get it,” if I was expecting a friend to call.

The yellow phone sat on our avocado green counter underneath a sign my brother had stolen off a telephone pole that said, “Repent.” It was 1975, and our electric yellow kitchen was command central. A black-and-white notebook science teachers assigned us with measurement tables printed inside the back cover was stationed next to the phone where we all took messages for my family of three older brothers, my distracted suburban Junior League mother turned feminist, and my absent, rarely sober, traveling salesman father.

The notebook’s script now feels like seeing starlight. On the front, in my mother’s backward slanting script, she has written in black marker, “Telephone Messages. Do Not Remove. Do Not Abuse.” The comings and goings of the household revolved around that phone whose cord didn’t stretch very long and afforded no one any privacy.

The phone was the center of our solar system as we orbited the message book, each person’s note etched in a distinct script scribbled across the page, often with random doodles decorating the urgent or not-so-urgent memos— friends calling, appointments cancelled, a list of people to call about my grandmother’s funeral, condolences jotted down, a reminder that cow manure was being delivered for the garden, and a repairman calling back to be paid. Stuck in between is my brother’s message that I’ve gone to the grocery store with a neighbor or my oldest brother’s itemized list of what my parents owe him for his allowance and gas money. He even has a line item of $8.00 for me, but what could he have possibly bought me? A McDonald’s hamburger back then was 25 cents.

Like most people today without a landline, I reach for my cell phone first thing in the morning. I listen to podcasts to fall asleep, my phone on the bedside table, bathing my brain in EMFs while I sleep even though I know better. I toggle through the day, hard-pressed to be present with my phone omnipresent. I rudely check my phone for no real reason when having a conversation. I struggle to focus and scan so much information between texts, emails, and other social media that I often send my response to the wrong person. I no longer read as much as I used to: it’s easier to watch or listen, and I can only absorb smaller chunks of material at a time.

At fifty-nine, I’m part of that awkward generation raised on 8 track cassettes who parented children who knew and know far more about technology as young adults than I ever will. I lost control of my son and daughter’s phone usage the minute they held them in their precious little hands. Exposure to pornography, cyberbullying, sexting, violent video games, and so much more has been part of our learning curve as a family. Some of the most dysfunctional moments in our household have been focused on technology overuse. Moments like the time when, in a fit of anger at being ignored after I asked my 13-year-old to get off the computer for the 100^th time, I jerked the computer’s plug out of the socket, and the Apple desktop came crashing to the floor.

My only leverage as a parent was to threaten to take away the cell phone, which I only succeeded in doing once.

For a while, I threatened my family with disconnecting from my cell phone and buying a flip phone. I’ve googled “how to get off social media,” all the while aware of the irony of searching the internet to discover how to wean myself off it. That’s like an alcoholic sipping a gin and tonic at his favorite bar and asking the bartender how to quit drinking.

Cell phones are the present and the future—hardly surprising news in a world with over 8 billion cell phone users where seven percent of Americans own a cell phone, and we average almost four hours daily scrolling on our phones. More men own them than women, and the largest ownership demographic are millennials and people ages 29-49, according to the Pew Research Center.

As we scroll and click, looking down at a phone, our spine reshapes into what’s now called a “tech neck.” An endless meal of satisfying information, disturbing news, games, funny reels, inspiring quotes, texts, and emails doesn’t leave time for the mind to unwind and even, in its boredom, to meander into our original thoughts and musings. Our endless appetite for data weakens the muscle of our imaginations. And certainly, there aren’t any paper trails to discover like my family’s phone message book because no one tucks notes, letters, cards or at one time newspaper clippings between the pages of a phone, text, or email. We just all exist somewhere in the iCloud.

I have a bad habit of watching too many rescue dog videos, doomsday predictions, and trad wives making sour-dough bread. The truth is I can’t adjust to a flip phone. I need to be able to text my family and friends, take pictures of my morning glories and moonflowers, and quickly search the internet for store hours or locations. When I threaten to delete my Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts, I can’t imagine publishing an article and not getting my dopamine hits from seeing how many people read and like it. Or don’t. I’m also fascinated and fatigued by the social discord and discourse on politics, though I know better than to engage. So, the extent of my social media use, at times, is more voyeuristic than realistic.

As far as I can tell, technology controls us. We do not control it. It’s disturbing when I casually mention to my husband that I haven’t seen a friend from high school for 30 years who I just ran into at the grocery store. The next thing I know, their profile pops up on Facebook. We are being tracked and listened to as if someone shot us with a stun gun, tagged us and now monitors us. Except we have willingly bowed down to these potentially deadly devices whose long-term health effects of being exposed to constant, high doses of radiation, as in 5G phones, have yet to be studied.

I can’t focus deeply when tethered to the phone’s constant distraction. I disconnect from my creativity with a free-floating sense of dissatisfaction as my constant companion while I watch everyone else’s manufactured highlight reels. Though most of the time, Google Maps has been a Godsend since I’m directionally challenged, there’s something to be said for cobbling together directions from an unwieldy paper map, a kind stranger at the gas station, and human trial and error. The ineffable sense of communication between humans, between sentient creatures, with their unique facial expressions and quirky responses, cannot be replicated on the screen, no matter how many fabulous recipes or hairstyle tips I’ve learned.

I don’t like Alexa, Ring, or being bathed in EMFs at home, in the grocery store, or anywhere else. Cell towers disguised as fake Christmas trees creep me out. At the end of 2022, there were over 142,000 cell phone towers across the country and approximately 452,000 small cell phone nodes tucked on building ledges and edges. The AT&T outage in California and AT&T’s request to make landlines obsolete this year has upset many people who still have a landline, according to a recent NYT article, “Landline Users Remain Proudly Old-Fashioned in the Digital Age.” The small, mostly over-60 minority who still have a landline contend that landlines are important because they’re reliable during power outages and bad weather and aren’t vulnerable to cyber-attacks.

Some states are proposing banning cell phones in school, as suggested by Jonathon Haidt in his book The Anxious Generation. I’m part of Generation X, the feral generation of latchkey kids left to our own devices unsupervised by absent adults. When I went to college, I called home from the payphone at the end of the hall. I rode the streetcar downtown to the Western Union office to receive a wired check when I ran out of money. My junior year abroad, I took the bus into Canterbury on Saturdays to make phone calls from a red phone booth. There were glitches, of course, like the time a bus in Paris dropped me off on a side street in the middle of the city instead of at the train station on my way to visit a friend. With too little money and poor language skills, I had to find my way to her apartment, sneak in behind a couple to get inside the locked gate, and wait for hours outside her apartment door since she went out after not finding me at the train station.

I know I sound like a ridiculous meme waxing nostalgic about yesteryear, but I often think about how technology influences our behavior and communication. I imagine my grandmother leaving her family farm in Wisconsin and boarding a ship to Panama to meet her sister, who was a nurse. I have the telegrams my uncles sent home during WWII and family letters—so many letters—that generations of my family wrote and sent.

Because I know I can’t turn back time or do anything about the band of satellites embracing Earth, I’m grateful that we didn’t have cell phones in high school. I’m grateful for that time away from screens. The time when we were okay not knowing exactly where everyone was; the time when we left more things up to chance. When my generation dies, it’s strange to think we will be the last generation raised without cellphones in our pockets.