Watch an old movie from the 1920s and you’ll see the telephone was already fully integrated into people’s lives, but it was not yet in everyone’s home. Often there would be a coin operated phone in the corridor or a communal one in the parlor of a boarding house.

But by the end of World War II, certainly any aspiring middle class home had at least one telephone line. We had ideas about phone usage. Women loved to gossip on the phone. Teenagers were positively addicted to it. Remember this from Bye-Bye Birdie:

(To get to that video and read the rest of this possibly life-altering post, please head over to VM’s Blood Diva blog.