1950, When Phones Were Really Smart

My grandmother felt very strongly that teenagers didn’t make good babysitters. She didn’t believe they’d have enough knowledge or instinct to properly take care of children, so she wasn’t about to trust her two boys with one. She was quite pleased when she was able to hire a much older woman to watch my dad and my uncle; someone who had “been there and done that” and would know what to do in an emergency. Unfortunately for all involved, what my grandmother learned was, if you hire someone too old, they are the emergency.

One night, my grandmother needed to attend a meeting, while my grandfather was at a different meeting somewhere else. Cue the aged babysitter.

My dad and uncle were in bed, asleep, when the babysitter started feeling extremely unwell. She made it to the bathroom and was sitting on the toilet when she lost consciousness and toppled into the adjacent bathtub. That paints a picture in your mind's eye, doesn’t it? I mean, collapsing on the floor is one thing, but landing in the bathtub is quite another.

Her fall made enough noise to wake up my seven-year-old dad. What a discovery he made in the bathroom! He then woke up his younger brother, instructing him to pray, while Dad telephoned for help, which is really covering all the bases.

Not only did the operator send help while keeping Dad on the line and calm, but armed with the knowledge of where she’d just sent the ambulance, she was able to have another operator call the neighbors to tell them to run over to be with the boys until their parents returned. And, being a close-knit community, those neighbors knew exactly where my grandparents were and called them at their respective meeting places to tell them to come home immediately. The operator even called back later that night to check in on everyone.

I guess even back in the day that was exceptional operator service because my grandfather wrote a letter of appreciation to the phone company. I further guess it was deemed an exceptional situation because it was all written up in the 1950 summer issue of The Telephone News, the Bell Telephone Company employee magazine.

My poor grandmother took a lot of teasing about the results of her ageism. I myself was a teenage babysitter. I remember meeting a couple on the beach and they pitched an “easy gig.” They wanted to go out that night, and if I came over, they promised their toddler son would already be asleep. I could basically just hang out, only needing to comfort him if he woke up crying. When I arrived, true to their word, he was already in his crib, so they didn’t even show me his room. They left and I went right to work eating their snacks and watching TV, Charlie’s Angels no doubt. About a half hour later I heard a faint noise outside and looked out the window. There was the kid, wearing a diaper and nothing else, taking off down the middle of the street. The parents failed to mention his bedroom had a door to the outside, or more importantly, that he was a runner. In that moment, feeling utterly terrified and in WAY over my head, I had to concede maybe my grandmother wasn’t wrong. So maybe middle-aged babysitters?