Comment by dugmartin

My dad told me stories from early in his career at GTE about replacing barb wire phone lines in the 1950s and 1960s in rural southern Illinois. Most of those systems were hooked up to wooden hand crank phones mounted on the wall in houses and barns. He said they would make piles of those old phones and then burn them all.

One other thing I remember from those stories was a lot of the systems were wired in a way that picking up the phone would cutoff anyone farther down the line - so no party line snooping which I remember doing in the 1970s and early 1980s on the phone at my grandmas farm in rural southern Indiana.