Tales from the Olden Days of Landline Phones

The subreddit No Stupid Questions implies a judgement-free place to ask about what you don't know. One reader posted, "In pre-cell phone movies, parents are shown giving babysitters numbers to restaurants to reach them in case of emergency. Is this a real thing and how did it work? How would the restaurant know who I am to hand me the phone?" This is not a stupid question, just one outside of their experience. And it sure makes us feel old. 

Yes, this was a thing back in the prehistoric time of land lines. Restaurants knew about babysitters. If they got such a call, they would either find the parents by a description, or call out a name, or check the reservation list. But no, they wouldn't just hand you the phone. The parent would go to the front desk to take the call. Sure, in the swankiest of restaurants, like in the movies, they might have a long phone cord or extra plugs in the dining area, but that was rare. The post at reddit has more than 350 responses, and some of those are stories of such emergency calls that are very much worth sharing. Continue reading to see them.  

As a babysitter in the '70s, I can confirm this is true. 

The kids had an accident and I had to call the restaurant to tell the parents we were heading to the emergency room with a neighbor. I wasn't old enough to drive.

I didn't wait on the phone. I told the person who answered the phone their name and how they were dressed. They also drove a really cool car, so I mentioned that and told the hostess that we were going to the emergency room and that they needed to get the message to the parents right away.

It worked because they got to the hospital shortly after we got there.

One of the kids had broken their arm falling off of a swing set in the backyard.

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Story time!

Shibuya Tokyo 1970.

When I was a kid our parents worked at the Australian Embassy and were at a dinner party at a restaurant when our maid accidentally left the stove top on heating oil for chips ( french fries )

She then proceeded to leave the house to walk her friend to a train station leaving three kids asleep inside a house which caught fire. My sister was the eldest at 11 years old.

Our cat woke my sister. She woke my brother and me and we got out barely with our lives. We never saw the maid again. We presume she returned to a house ablaze and left the city for her home town.

My brother remembered his friends phone number. And by coincidence his friends parents were at the same party so weren't home, but their maid knew the details for whose party it was. But they weren't home either obviously because the party was at a restaurant but their maid knew the restaurant.

And that's how a restaurant in Tokyo got a 4th hand message that by the time our parents at a table got it, was something like "There's bit of a fire at your house on a rug or something and apparently it would be good for you to go home early"

Being party animals, my folks invited the whole dinner party back to our house.

A string of embassy cars arrived to discover the road blocked by the fire-brigade and the house engulfed in flame. My mother tried to run into the house but was seized by the firemen who wouldn't let her go.

The fireman didn't speak English. My mother spoke maybe 50 words of Japanese. It apparently took a few minutes to work out that they would not release her until she told them how many children had been in the house.

But yeah, in an emergency, you used to be able to call a restaurant to get in touch with someone. 

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Once in early high school I babysat for friends of one of my regular babysitting clients. They were in town for a wedding, so I went to their hotel room to watch their two little kids. One was I think 4 and the other was a two year old girl. The parents gave me a number for the wedding venue and that was all I had. We watched a show, I put them to bed, and then around 9ish the two year old started vomiting profusely. I tried the wedding venue number and no one picked up. I had no other way to contact them and was like 14- so thankfully I was able to call my mom! She came over and helped me with both the kids until the parents got home a couple hours later.. the little girl might have had a fever, I can’t remember- she ended up being ok. Anyhow it was the Wild West back then and my mom saved the day that day! 

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When my brother had a bad car accident in the 80s, my parents were on the road travelling with me.

His girlfriend called the next motel that she knew we were planning on staying at, but she’d missed us. The motel manager called the local radio station, who put a notice out on-air for mum & dad to call home due to a family emergency.

When they stopped to get petrol, a guy at the service station recognised their car and told them about the radio message, and to call home.

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A friend's mother once called the bar where we were at because we were not yet home for dinner as promised. She literally told the bartender over the phone, "Those girls need to come home right now for dinner because I made liver special for them!" And the bartender loudly repeated it word for word. 

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I've been to events at this private club in NYC where each table once had it's own button for calling the server, like a little doorbell. At some point these were upgraded to also include an old school phone jack. All of it was long-since deactivated but presumably the idea was that if someone called the club switchboard and asked for Mr. Moneybucks the valet could bring a phone over to his table, plug it in, and he could decide the fate of the universe while not having to get up from his martini or whatever. 

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In 1989 I was the “parent” (actually of my dog) and my housemate called the Friendly’s where I was eating to tell me that he was having a health emergency. She just described me and the person I was with, they found me, and I took the call.

Longer story, I went home, took the bloated dog to the animal hospital, waited around for 90 minutes and then they came and told me that they couldn’t keep him still for an X-ray but that he had “released a lot of flatulence” while on the table and seemed fine now. I paid $75 for my dog to fart in front of a vet.