From the Archives

In our increasingly connected world, this 70-year-old letter from April 1948 seems impossibly quaint.

My mother lives in a small Arizona town of perhaps 500 inhabitants and a dozen telephones. She hasn’t one, so when my sister had her first baby I put in a person-to-person call for Mother through the telephone office. “It’ll take a while to get Mrs Quinn here,” my operator was told. “Her place is about half a mile down the road.” “Will there be a charge for messenger service?” asked my operator. “No indeed, ma’am, no charge at all. I’ll just fire a shot down in that direction and when Mrs Quinn looks up this way to see what’s going on, I’ll wave her in.”