Many readers of the Allen Advocate will remember the old crank telephones that hung on a wall. They served their purpose for a time. What I remember about them was that they must have been difficult for a person to hear good on them, especially if someone from a party line was connected and listening to your conversation. I heard my dad many times holler into the phone or ask the nosy listener to get off the line. For some reason I never wanted to use that phone, Anyway, it was so high on the wall, I would have had to get a chair to be able to use it. Though I never used it, I can still remember our number, 1608f12, on the party line, our number was two longs rings and a short ring. Anyone remember what two letters Allen had to start the local phone numbers?

In fact, even when the rotary desk phone came out, I never used it. I even got kidded at school in the sixth grade for not knowing how to use the phone even though I knew how. Why would I want to call someone with four brothers, two sisters, and my parents hearing everything I said?

The funniest thing I remember about party phone lines was when our older sister and her husband had their first baby, The baby was the first grandchild for my parents. My dad had taken some ribbing from a few of his friends about not having a grandchild.

I remember my mom getting the call that she was a grandmother. We were all outside hand digging a water well. That was the only time I ever saw my dad quit what he was doing, go get cleaned up and dressed, so they could leave to see this new granddaughter. The next day two brothers, Johnny and Marion were walking back from town and they stopped at a neighbor’s house to get a drink of water. When getting the water, they told the neighbor about our sister having a baby. He said, “That’s nothing, I knew it before any of you did.” He was the neighbor that was always listing to other people’s conversations. I can only reason that because he lived onehalf mile closer to town, he thought: “I heard it first!”

I have heard it said that play is the first form of research. I don’t know if you can put an age limit on that thought. While growing up around Allen, there were several schools that had shut down by the time I was ten years old. I believe there some law that required a school building to be in every section of land? The close ones I knew of were the Fairview, Citra and Round Prairie schools. My parents owned land near the first two and my dad and his brothers, Andrew and Truman, would always put up the hay at the Anglin meadow by the Round Prairie school building. I believe this land is now owned by the Howard family.

As young kids, especially Johnny and I, we did a lot of research (play) with those schools. We just couldn’t understand why grown adults would just leave school buildings wide open to people, animals, and birds. Our reasoning was, if grownups didn’t care about the old schools we could do our research with them. All of the buildings had those tall windows with all the smaller windowpanes. Our job on the hay field at the Anglin meadow was to keep the water can full of cool water. To do that, we had to go up to the corner of the intersection where there was a hand pump water well. On the way to and from the field, there were lots of rocks in the gravel road. Needless to say, we had fun breaking out those windows of the schoolhouse. Not only that school, but also the schools at Citra and Fairview. The people that built the Fairview school must have put more thinking into it, that school was too far away from the road, but that didn’t stop two boys that were wearing overalls, from loading up with rocks and getting through the fence to do more research. I have to write, we did our research with those old schools, but there was no development to go along with it