Q: If someone from the 1950's suddenly appeared today,

[hunter]

69. Our phone was a party line. That was in the 'sixties.

I don't know how many homes shared the line but if you picked up the phone intending to make a call and heard someone talking you'd hang the phone right back up again.

As children we simply weren't allowed to use the phone without permission from our parents, even as teenagers. Maybe especially as teenagers. The phone was on the wall in the kitchen. In our big family there was never any privacy.

At my great grandma's house all the neighboring ranches for miles around shared a single phone line. They used the old wooden phones with cranks. When you turned the crank the bells on every phone on the line would ring. You identified who the call was intended for by the pattern of rings, but anyone could pick up. To make longer distance calls you called the operator who had her own ring pattern and lived in a small town thirty miles down the line.