Mrs. Minnie Rothfil of Trenton, New Jersey, a widowed Jewish mother with ESP, was unable to get through to her bachelor son. For the first time, Irving Rothfil was able to complete the sex act free of the coitus interruptus of one of his mother’s intuitively timed calls. The girl became pregnant and Irving was forced to marry her. Mrs. Minnie Rothfil went along on the honeymoon.
A doctor in rural Oregon, frustrated in his attempt to phone in a prescription renewal, forgot about it altogether. The result was that Oscar and Myra Dorian were deprived of the hormones by which the doctor had been keeping their marriage in balance. Myra’s voice deepened and she not only sprouted a beard, but also a thick lawn of hair on her chest. Oscar went soprano, suffered a genital inversion, and started wearing Myra’s lingerie. The sex-role changes proved irreversible. Today the Dorians have the most successful marriage in the country.
There were those who responded to the phone hush by fighting back with good old American business initiative. One such was a Chicago call girl named Eva DePenable. She made a deal with a fellow who trained carrier pigeons. So many of these pigeons were released by conventioneers arriving at O’Hare Airport that they became a hazard to low-flying planes. Eva DePenable subsequently faced charges by the Federal Aeronautics Administration, the Interstate Commerce Commission, and the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department!
All over the country, sexual activities were affected by the phone failure. Straying husbands, unable to call their wives to say they’d been held up by important business meetings, forsook round-heeled secretaries and caught their commuter trains home. Unfaithful wives, kept from setting up motel assignations, sublimated with housecleaning binges. Immobilized bachelors stared blankly at their little black books. Single girls’ hearts leaped wildly at the sound of ringing, only to sink again with the realization that it was merely the timer on the stove giving notice to turn the one lonely lamb chop broiling there. According to a Gallup poll, during the telephone crisis the masturbatory rate across the nation rose by twelve-point-two percent.
Nor was sex the only area of life affected. Orders to liquor stores, bets to bookies, margin-buying calls to stockbrokers, were all frustrated, thereby postponing catastrophe for many an alcoholic, bangtail patsy, and prospective bankrupt. It was a time of relief for those on the sucker lists of phone subscription salesmen, a reprieve to the victims of party-line gossip, and a hiatus to the recipients of telephoned bad news everywhere.
If some of the worst people benefited by the phone blackout, it’s also true that some of the best-meaning folk met with catastrophe. For instance, there was Ernest Heavyweight, a Scoutmaster of Billings, Montana. Ernest faced the emergency by assembling Boy Scout Troop Thirty-one for a demonstration of the feasibility of substituting Indian smoke signals for the defunct phone system. While waving a blanket over a roaring bonfire, he inadvertently set himself on fire. Ernest Heavyweight was immolated to a crisp, and the seventeen horrified boys who witnessed it were disillusioned with scouting ever after.
Less extreme, but still quite sad, was the effect the phone hush had on Mrs. Amy Simple, a Colorado farm wife, and her marriage. For many years Mrs. Simple’s husband had expressed himself to her only by flatulence and eructation, which—translated from the original Agnew—means that instead of talking to her, he farted and belched. To make this noise pollution bearable, Mrs. Simple sought solace each day by calling “Dial-a-Prayer.” Finding herself deprived of this solace, she tried to convey her feelings of inner turmoil to Farmer Simple while he was cavorting with his hogs in the barn. When he responded with his usual gaseous explosion, her customary passivity cracked and she plunged, a pitchfork into his rear end with all her might. This brought forth a sustained hissing sound similar to that of a punctured tire. Farmer Simple has neither eructed nor flatulated from that day to this. And now, alas, there is no communication at all in the Simple household.
Some of the victims of the phone muting later sued the telephone company for damages. Among them was Dr. Cesar E. N. Padaffi, a Detroit obstetrician. He claimed that a patient of his had wasted so much time trying to telephone him to say her labor pains had started that the baby was born in a taxicab en route to the hospital. The cabdriver had delivered it with no trouble at all. But Dr. Padaffi had been forced to split his fee with the hackie, and he was suing Ma Bell to recover the half he’d lost.
Mrs. Dinah Spoyler of Jackson, Mississippi, also sued, claiming she’d been widowed as a result of the interruption in her phone service. When Mrs. Spoyler’s toilet backed up and regurgitated, her husband reached for the plunger, and Mrs. Spoyler—having had certain unpleasant experiences in the past with his do-it-your-self bungling of household repairs—raced to the telephone to call the plumber. She was still frantically trying to dial the dead phone when the late Mr. Spoyler passed her on the way to the basement, various wrenches clanking from his eager hands. Desperately, she kept trying to call. But she abandoned her efforts when she heard loud gurgling sounds from the cellar. She raced toward the sounds, but arrived too late. Mr. Spoyler had opened a valve leading to an outside sewer, causing the main sewer pipe to back up and split at the joint. The flood of offal was almost to the basement ceiling by the time she arrived. Aware that her husband couldn’t swim, she valiantly dived into the foul mess, plunged to the bottom again and again in an effort to save him, but to no avail. Mr. Spoyler perished under the bulk of his neighbors’ defecations. Besides suing for the loss of her husband’s services, Mrs. Spoyler also sought restitution for damages to her olfactory image, claiming that she now bore a permanent odor of organic waste which caused her to be socially ostracized.
Besides lawsuits, the telephone company had other, more immediate problems. For example, in Cedarhurst, Long Island, a suburb of New York City, local teenagers were so enraged at being deprived of their daily three-hour telephone privileges that they staged a demonstration to hang Alexander Graham Bell in effigy, rioted, and burned down the local Bell exchange. There were many similar incidents around the country.
Because of them, and because the phone-company management was sure that the breakdown was the result of espionage by perennially striking employees, the top brass demanded that government officials issue “Shoot to kill!” orders and enforce them against anyone caught tampering with phone-company equipment. Mayor Daley of Chicago and governors Reagan of California and Rockefeller of New York quickly complied with the request. New York City’s Mayor Lindsay responded by criticizing the Rockefeller edict.
Other public figures also commented on the telephone crisis. Hundreds of statements were issued by leaders from all segments of the nation’s society. Among them were the following22 :
“Let me make one thing perfectly clear: Motherhood is sacred! I would be derelict in my duty if I stood by idly and allowed a mother like Ma Bell to be reduced to the status of a second-rate communications power in the world today. I would not hesitate to pledge the entire armed might of this nation—the mightiest armed might of the mightiest armed nation in the history of the world—to the restoration of her former glory, including—let there be no mistake about this!—including whatever rate increases may prove necessary to insure the future security of your telephone company and mine!”-—Richard Milhous Nixon.