Member-only story
A long-forgotten connection
For the duration of my childhood, a heavy, black, rotary phone sat on the corner of my father’s desk. The handset rested in a sturdy u-shaped cradle, connected to the base by a curled cord. The paint on the fingerholes had long ago been worn away, leaving each circle with a burnished silver patina. All 10 holes were labeled by number, counterclockwise from 1 through 9, with the last assigned the number zero for the operator.
Oh, how I loved that phone. I loved the soft whir it made as the dial rotated forward and then back. I loved how the handset felt, weighty with the importance of an impending call. But in all that time, I never took notice of the number scrawled across the small bit of paper pasted into the middle of the dial. Yellowed, but protected under a sliver of plastic, it read simply, 2–4664.
This past summer, while going through some of my father’s old boxes, I came across a 1955 Newburyport telephone directory. In the early 1950s, he moved to Newburyport after serving in WWII. Young and still a bachelor, my dad rented a house on High Street for himself and his mother. It would remain his residence until he married in 1956.
