My name is John Apperson, I was born in Missouri in the late 1950s and lived on a farm until I was five years old. The house I lived in as a child was built in 1830. Back in those days farms were low on Bell Telephones priority list, so we had a crank telephone. The other farms in the area were all wired together as a large party line. If you wanted to call a neighbor you might crank long-short-long.