The Life of Me: An Autobiography

by Clarence Edgar Johnson

But that was in farming country. In cattle country it was different. I'll bet a ranch boy wouldn't have known what a surley was. One of my rancher uncles was talking to a farmer who had some calves he wanted to sell to the rancher. He told the rancher, "Three of those calves are still nursing." Well, my uncle and his daughter had to put forth an effort to hold back their laughter. They were not used to nursing calves. In cattle country calves don't nurse, they suck.

Continuing along that same line, up until I was a teenager, I never heard the words "sex" or "male" or "female" used except by some dirty-mouthed kid. Even when I was in the seventh and eighth grades, when I had to fill out certain school papers and was told to put an M for male or an F for female, there was a wee bit of embarrassment or shyness associated with the use of gender words. The use of the word "sex" was still guarded against, except in writing. The word was never spoken in mixed company. The word "gender" was considered bad enough.

And speaking of dirty-mouthed kids—no one in our family ever used any kind of dirty words, at least not in my presence. Some of the brothers I grew up with are in their seventies now and I can truthfully say, I can not recall ever having heard one of them "cuss" nor utter a dirty word.

We have all heard of that proverbial corner around which prosperity is lurking. Well, at the Exum place we finally rounded that corner and bumped right into it. We got a telephone.

I'm sure we didn't have a telephone at the Flint place. But by about the time I started to school, almost everyone in our neighborhood had one. There were maybe eight or ten parties on the same line.

We owned our own telephone, put up our own lines, and bought our own batteries. Having so many on one line wasn't the best arrangement but it was better than no phone at all. It was a big step forward at that time in the history of our community.

Every day at noon—straight up twelve o'clock—the operator would ring a long, long ring. We could set our clocks by it and we could listen to the weather forecast immediately after the long ring. I don't know where they got the weather information, probably from a record of what the weather did on that same day a year ago, or maybe from the almanac. Anyway, wherever they got it, most of us listened to it and were stuck with it.

In the above paragraph I said the operator would ring. That's not exactly right. It's true, she was a woman operator. And we kids knew she was a woman, but we didn't know she was an operator. We only knew her as "Central." As far as we were concerned, her name might just as well have been Mrs. Central.

At any rate, when we wanted to ring someone on our line, out our direction from "Central," all we had to do was turn the crank and ring their ring. For instance, our ring was a long and four shorts. But, if we wanted to talk to someone on a line out another direction from Hamlin, we had to ring a long ring to get "Central" and get her to connect our line to the other line. Then she would ring that party for us.

When any of us tried and tried to ring Central and couldn't get her to answer, naturally all the phones on our line would be ringing at the same time, and usually some neighbor on our line would volunteer to ring for us and help us get through to Central. Perhaps the neighbor's phone had a stronger magneto, or perhaps two or three of us ringing at the same time might send a stronger current and get through to her. We tried everything.