(Anita ducks down, and then sticks her head up again, doing her best prairie-dog imitation. Coast seems clear)
My dad quit his day job as a high school principal, and went into the radio repair business in 1946. No televisions yet--that came later. Since he was supporting five kids, (the sixth was yet to come
), he was on a shoe-string budget, and ran the business out of our house. He used our party line for his business phone. It worked OK, until the girl down the street hit her teen years. She spent so much time on the phone that he was forced to break down and pay for a private line--which was high-priced, in those days.
He also bought one of the early answering machines. You couldn't record your own voice on it--it came with a woman's voice already on it. We called her "Susie." It turned out that the customers hated talking to a machine, especially one with a stranger's voice on it, and Dad had to junk the thing.
Maybe if he'd bought the deluxe model, and put his own voice on it, it would have flown...