memes

I only encountered them once - in rural arizona (70s casa grande). Blew my young mind.

We had party lines in regional Australia in the mid 90's. The selective ringing had been phased out long before I was born, it either wasn't available or rather as a kid I was never taught how to alert specific houses on the line. So it sort of operated more like a community chat room.

It was mostly only used for emergencies, if you saw smoke you'd pick up the handset for the party line and others would do the same and you'd try to figure out who's back paddock was on fire and coordinate to all go down and snuff it out. Or if you didn't recognise the livestock that wandered onto your block you'd jump on to see if anyone was asking where their sheep went.

But we also had private lines by then, so no one was really hanging out and gossiping on the party line. Occasionally the party line would be used for organised social programs like book clubs if no one could be bothered hosting at their home. We used the personal line for dialing out for calls, and kept the party line free for emergencies.

I never realised it was a party line, or a thing in other places or times in history. I thought it was a cool thing the community just installed themselves using a closed phone loop. Growing up I assumed that since the invention of affordable home phone lines, we'd just always had two phones. One for actually phoning people, and one for town meetings.

They were uncommon where I grew up, but older houses still had them and were being slowly phased out as houses in the neighbourhood sold. Ours was one of the last in the area to be removed/replaced, when it rained the lines still crossed with the houses that had the upgrade.

Also late 40s, my grandparents had a party line when I was young, they were in a very small town.