The handset, attached by a coiled cord, rests in its cradle. The base has a clear dial with ten finger holes. The telephone is the most ordinary of household objects but, sitting silently on the table, it seems to portend something.
Suddenly it does: a metallic brrrrring, distinctive and familiar. Nearby on the carpet, a smiling girl with pigtails and a ruffled-sleeve dress leaps to her feet, races over, and picks up the handset. She holds a stuffed toy duck to the receiver.
He has neatly brushed brown hair and wears a white shirt buttoned to the neck. He grabs the handset from Susie and demonstrates proper etiquette: “Hello. This is Jimmy.” He listens and speaks again.
He takes the handset and holds it to his ear, stretching its coiled cord. That one belongs to Susie.” No time for jokes, though. Captain Adams needs Uncle Bill to come at once.
These are the whitest white people you’ve ever seen, performing a fantasy of middle-class American life familiar from TV sitcoms that featured Wally and Beaver, Mike and Robbie and Chip. Eighty-nine years into the telephone era, this wholesome scene opened a movie called We Learn About the Telephone, made in Technicolor on behalf of American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) by a well-known Hollywood producer, Jerry Fairbanks. The film was distributed as a public service to schools around the country and played for a captive audience of children in classrooms.
In 1965, the United States had one telephone for every four people; the number had tripled in the two decades since World War II. It already seemed the universal appliance. Yet the phone company—there was basically just one—still thought its customers needed instruction.
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