Just in case anyone wanted to know the correct time.
I threw in the day and date for free in case you are really out of it.
Back when I was a kid we called the operator (by dialing 0) and asked her for the time. That was a sort of cool feature. You got to hear a real person.
One of my friend's mother was an operator in the small town I grew up in. That was before the day of automatic switching. You would pick up the phone and tell Marty (her name) please connect me to _______. I put the blank in because I was too little to use the phone. I'm really not sure if you said, "connect me to 258 or "Joe" or "Bill" or whoever you wanted to call. I'm assuming you could give Marty either a number or a name. The reason I don't know is because by the time I was old enough to use the phone we had a number you could dial. Our number was 258.
Some people had party lines. If you picked up the phone and someone was talking you either waited until they finished (by politely hanging up and picking up the receiver after a bit of time) or in an emergency by asking them if they would please hang up. It's sort of funny to me to think of our worries about privacy nowadays with that "trust based" system.
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One time a friend of mine in college and I were fooling around with two phones. We took the phone from his room and stretched the cord until it touched the phone from my room. We held the receiver's together and dialed the numbers of two girls we knew, that knew each other. They both answered after a couple of rings and started talking to each other. The funny thing (to us listening) was that neither one of them knew why the other had called. They talked for quite awhile and then eventually one girl says to the other, "so why did you call?" "I thought you called me?" "I thought you called me? "What....?" "Anyway nice talking with you, have a good night." "Bye" "Bye".
That was before the day of call forwarding. So we thought we were pretty clever.
I don't know how many prank calls I made to people over the years. Mostly just lame stuff like do you have Prince Albert in the can? or dopey stuff we thought was funny. Actually I still think some of that kind of thing is pretty funny. I have to admit I don't really care for the show Crank Yankers though. That's a little too mean or crude or something for my tastes nowadays.
I get a fair number of crank prank calls at work from friends.
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I got a voice message just a couple of weeks ago from the "state fish and game department" wanting to talk to me about some fishing violation having to do with tuna fishing. It was one of my friends leaving me a prank message.
Our fishing exploits (and his) go back a ways. He's the guy who was with the other guys who accidently blew a hole in their drift boat with an M-80...and almost drowned another time when they got stuck in a dead end of dead fall on the Hoh river.
He and I had gotten a warning for fishing without a license in Minnesota a few years back. Normally I would never do that sort of thing (if I'm going fishing I'll buy a license). That particular morning we were just messing around, staying at a lake cottage...far from a place to get a license. We put on the goofiest looking caps and hats we could find, stocked up on beer and drinks and floated out on the lake. We weren't really fishing so much as drinking with fishing poles in a boat.
Anyway the county sheriff deputy under deputy or someone like that happened to be cruising that small lake that morning. He let my buddy, my brother in law and me, off with a warning. After a stern lecture where he told us he would be keeping an eye on us (he was about 20 and we were staid working folks approaching 50) he told us he didn't want to see us on that lake again (which is going to be tough since my wife and kids share a lake cottage there). he he.
First he asked us if we were fishing? Man we thought that was funny. Actually we had multiple poles in the boat and had been holding them off and on. Since we were wearing orange hunting caps we thought it would be funny to tell him, "no but we just shot a deer in the woods over there...would you like to see it?" He asked my buddy if he had a license to fish and he said, "Uhhhhh I have a fishing license from Washington (the state)." ha ha. Deputy dog says, "Well you're in Minnesota now."
Were joking..no kidding? We just was up and drivin round and we're in Minnesota you say? Hot dang.
The joke for us was centered around the show Coach. Not sure if you ever saw it. But there was a guy named Daryl that would show up with his brothers and say, "Hi I'm Daryl and this is my brother Daryl and my other brother Daryl." Our wives were calling us the three Daryls that morning.
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One other fishing story this morning.
This happened to a friend of my wife's dad. The guy ended up getting a new Range Rover out of the deal (that's what my wife's dad used to say).
Paul, my wife's dad, and some other guys went to a small town in Northern Minnesota to fish. They had a couple of boats. One of the boats belonged to the guy who got the Range Rover, I'll call him Bill.
Bill was wound up pretty tight and had a nice head of hair. Amazingly nice for a guy his age. And it was still it's natural color.
The other guys on the fishing trip knew one of the deputies in that town. They thought it would be a good joke to have this deputy meet the boats when they got back from fishing and tell Bill some kind of cock and bull story about illegal fishing being reported involving a boat matching the description of Bill's boat...a trip to jail and the need to impound his boat as evidence.
It was all funnier than heck to the other guys but Bill was really worried. I mean really worried.
In fact he was so worried that a few weeks later his hair turned white, and then all fell out. I'm tellin you what my father in law told us.
Anyway Bill sued that city's sheriff's department, got a fair sized settlement, and bought himself his dream Range Rover.
You decide if all fisherman are liers. I think that's a true story. Paul made no indication that it was not.
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Paul was a PK (preacher's kid). He loved fishing. He used to quote a ficticious Bible passage from Hezekiah. He'd say, you know "Hezekiah 6.14 says the time a man spends fishing will not be held against him in heaven." We all miss him a lot. He passed away from his second bypass surgery when he was 65.
Paul or J Paul as he was known, was a great person with some really good kids (one of them my wife).
He started out as a high school teacher, coach, then sold insurance and then started his own agency. He was very personable. Liked to talk and was good at it. I think my daughters inherited some of that conversational gene from him.
He enjoyed life to it's fullest while he was on this earth. Good guy. Great story teller, he loved fishing, and liked to have a few drinks. He called it water testing at the lake, the water there has iron in it. He'd say if you put scotch in it and it didn't turn black the water test passed...man we drank a lot of good water in the day. He like to play cards, hunt when he was younger (when he got older he liked to just go out and look at stuff while the younger guys hunted), and eat and share good food.
