One of the highlights of Christmas for the Nichols family was having kinfolks and neighbors to drop by. Of course if you lived in the rural South back then they were one and the same, mostly.
Zeke and Nettie Walden, our neighbors on the Caldwell place, came by to see our "new" home and to leave a big ole 'nanner puddin', Nettie's specialty.
They had a "spring" on their place that was lined with cedar boards that made it look like a huge barrel in the ground. That water was cold as a frog's belly and many times after we had milked the cows, we would take "sweet" milk down there to cool.
After they left we all began to laugh about the time Nettie got her new telephone. She was so excited about it because it was the very first one in that part of the country. Her excitement soon turned to frustration, however, when she began to realize that there was nobody to call. They had forgotten to tell her that you have to have at least two of those things before they will work.
So now we were fixed up pretty good on the Caldwell Place. Daddy had the only radio and Nettie had the only telephone and folks now had a choice of what to "watch" on Saturday night. We always seemed to have the biggest crowd.
Of course, Nettie eventually was able to "activate" her telephone as nearby neighbors and far away kinfolks began to acquire those strange looking wall boxes with the crank on the side. Many times I would go over to Nettie's house in hopes of hearing that telephone ring. She knew why I was there and sometimes when she was conversing on it, she would call me over and hold the receiver to my ear so I could listen to that strange voice coming from miles away.
"That's my sister in Saltillo," she would say, or "That's my cousin in Memphis." That was simply fascinating to a five-year-old boy!
That scene, of course, was multiplied thousands of times in the early thirties. And you know, as I revisit that scene in Nettie's parlor, I've often wondered what Alexander Graham Bell would have thought if he could have been peeking through the window at that sight. I'm sure he would have had a big smile on his face.
I have to smile sometimes when I think about Uncle Gube and Uncle Cliff DeVaughn going "fishing" one night in the Twenty-mile Canal using nothing but an old wall telephone.
This sounds so weird to some of you, I know, but many readers will remember that the telephone back then was powered by a magneto much like the old T-model cars and was, like the T-Model, energized by the turning of the crank. The end product was electricity.
Uncle Gube and Uncle Cliff were in the boat cranking the telephone that night with the magneto wires hanging over the back of the boat and in the water.
This activity was decidedly unlawful since it was not only killing "keeper" size catfish and bream, it was electrocuting all life in the water and carried a heavy fine plus time in jail.
About midnight as they were dragging their boatload of fish out of the canal, two game wardens were waiting for them. Their catch was confiscated and they were hauled off to jail in Tupelo.
Please understand that I am not smiling because my kinfolks got into trouble with the law. It was what Daddy said about the incident when somebody asked him what happened.
He said, "Well, Gube and Cliff were in the canal calling up fish on a telephone... and ended up dialing the wrong number!"
Taken from the book "My Brother Was An Only Child" by Arlis Nichols © 2003
*Not to be used without express permission from author