I'm already well over half-way through David Frum's book (it's only 147 pages long) and when I finish it I'll post a 'review' as I think he makes some very astute observations, however he mentioned something which was interesting and I thought I would share it, if for no other person's interest than WECO's.
While making a point, Frum mentions that until 1962 it was illegal for an American to POSSESS A WORKING TELEPHONE AND HOOK IT TO AN AT&T PHONE LINE, even if you were paying AT&T for monthly phone service.
I can remember when we moved from Michigan to SoCal in 1980 that when we called to have our phone service terminated, just like every other time that we had relocated in the past, only this time they sent someone to the house to pick-up the phones. When he arrived he mentioned that perhaps we should BUY at least one of the phones from AT&T since when we arrived in SoCal it might be awhile before the phone company could deliver our phones which meant that we'd have to probably go out and buy something anyway.
I have to admit that this sounded so odd since this had never been an issue before because we had always been living in Michigan and therefore being serviced by the same 'phone company' and we had simply been told to take our existing AT&T phones with us when we moved. We never thought much of it but technically those phones had never really belonged to us, but when we told the phone company that we were moving out-of-state, they wanted THEIR phones back. We bought one of the 'Princess' phones and it remained in service for nearly 30 years until a couple of years ago I finally replaced it (it was the only hard-wired phone in the house located in the master bathroom). It still worked just fine, but we had dropped the handset on the bathroom's tiled floor so many times that the plastic had cracked and pieces were missing and wires were starting to dangle from the gaps in the case.
Anyway, I thought this might be of interest to some of the younger people here who never experienced the era where there was but a SINGLE phone company in America, good old 'MA BELL'.
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