The telephone niche in the hall of the FOR SALE house was one of the first things that drew me to it. Located in a neighborhood just a stone’s throw from Tennessee Tech, the house was vacant and empty, so the niche had no phone in it. But the jack where one would have been connected was still in place.
“If I buy this house,” I promised myself, “I’m going to find an old-timey telephone to put in that spot.”
The house was built the very same year I was born: 1954. Though I spent my childhood and adolescence with corded land-line phones, none of my family’s homes ever had a niche. One of our phones hung on the wall near the kitchen sink. The other rested on a nightstand beside my parents’ bed. All calls were made and received on one of those two phones. No privacy. No secrets. No long, drawn-out conversations.
Fast forward more than half a century. As I gaze out the windows of my new-to-me house at the streets that lead to the Tech campus, I see students walking to class. Their necks are bent and their shoulders hunched as they stare down at the magical glowing screen in their hands. They’re oblivious to other pedestrians. To barking dogs. To sirens. They seem oblivious even to traffic.
At restaurants, I see couples and families and groups of friends more interested in their cell phones than each other. I watch young mothers hand their riding-in-the-grocery-buggy toddlers a phone to keep them quiet while they shop. I sit near passengers on airplanes who can spend an entire cross-country flight playing Candy Crush Saga on their phones without ever acknowledging the flight attendant or the person in the seat beside them.
I know people with phones so loaded with apps that it boggles the mind. Apps for maps. Apps for weather. Apps for music. Apps for email. Apps for social media. Apps for plant identification and bird identification and insect identification. Apps to order food. Apps for banking. Apps for airlines. Apps for movie tickets. Apps for games. Apps for every retail establishment imaginable.
Apps, apps, apps, apps, apps.
It’s enough to make me wish sometimes that we could just heave all those cell phones into a ditch. Perhaps then we might re-learn how to find our way to someplace unfamiliar by using a fold-up map. Perhaps we might gaze up at the sky and try to guess when the rain will arrive. Perhaps we might plop down in a porch swing and peruse an old-school newspaper while listening to a ballgame on a transistor radio. Perhaps we might even smile and holler hello at folks passing by.
Not long after I moved into the house with the telephone niche, I found a 1954 rotary-dial telephone on eBay. Black, of course. I bought it without thinking twice.
My granddaughter June was thrilled the first time she saw it. “Does it work?” she asked. I shook my head and told her to lift the receiver and listen for a dial tone. Then I explained what a dial tone is. I keep a phone book in that niche, too, so I showed her how to look up numbers. Then I let her practice dialing.
“If you mess up and don’t make your finger go all the way around,” I warned, “you have to start over from the beginning.” Not surprisingly, she got good at dialing real quick, though she’ll likely never use a phone like that to call anyone. There’s no going back for members of her generation. Truth is, there’s no going back even for me.
But every time I step into the hall of my old-timey house and see that old-timey telephone in its old-timey niche, I can’t help but long—at least a little–for the good old days.
(June 20, 2026)