1980s teens spent thousands flirting with strangers on the phone
Crossing the party lines
“Hi, I’m Scott, a big dude with big muscles. I play football.”
“Are you the person who was talking about lacrosse last night?”
“Yeah, yeah, that was me.”
“This isn’t the sports line. You’re supposed to try to get a girl, not a football.”
Welcome to the party line, a group phone call where teens went to meet strangers in the mid 1980s. Think of it like a precursor to the internet chat room.
Around the country, kids dialed numbers like 550-TEEN for access to party lines, otherwise known as group bridging services. The operators of these lines charged participants on a per minute basis, for example, 95 cents for the first minute and 45 cents for each additional.
After the first party lines opened, the fad exploded. Teens learned they could dial a simple phone number and charge any rates directly to their parents’ phone bill. Marketers knew it, and advertised party lines during after school television programs and in teen magazines.
Then parents saw the bills — their kids had charged hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars worth of calls in the space of weeks.
“I wanted to kill her,” said Chicago parent Sharon Croll. “And then my next reaction was, ‘No, my husband’s going to kill her.’” Croll’s 15-year-old daughter racked up $850 in one month talking on party lines. Another 15-year-old boy in Oakland, California, boy spent $4,168.39.
Parents organized town meetings and protests, and wrote in to telephone companies demanding the charges be reversed. One Chicago reverend compared party lines to crack, PCP, television, and VCRs. “Now here come the 900 numbers to finish the job on our children’s minds,” she told The Chicago Tribune in 1988.
The problem became so huge that telephone companies instituted policies that guaranteed teenagers’ first offenses would be forgiven, erased from the phone bill. Pacific Bell in California refunded $8.8 million in 1987 to customers for party line bill adjustments, according to The New York Times. Thereafter, it was on the parents, who could also pay $25 to the 900 Service Corporation to block the numbers.
Some chat lines attempted to appease parents by adding moderators who periodically reminded teens of the price per minute.
“I got on at 1 in the morning, and I didn’t get off till 6 in the morning,” one girl said on Connections, according to the Tribune.
“Your phone bills are going to be high,” warned another.
“I don’t care,” she said. “If there was no phone, I wouldn’t be living right now. In my town, there’s nothing to do.”
Teens called in when they were bored, lonely, or simply wanted to experiment.
“Hi, this is Kelly from North Attleborough.”
“Like, how old are you?”
“I’m 17. Who’s this?”
“Scott from Worcester. What do you look like?”
“I’m five foot five, I have brown hair and blue eyes — no, brown eyes…”
“Kids enjoy making up a new identity because on a phone you can be whoever you want to be,” Christopher Woods of the Friendship Network, a chat line company out of Los Angeles, told The Boston Globe. “Every guy on the line will say he drives a Porsche or some other exciting car. There’s a lot of fantasy involved.”
Fantasy is right. Some teens used the service to talk about sex, and later when moderators were added, used veiled language. “I listened in once, and I can’t even begin to tell you what they were talking about — with strangers!” a mother of three from Wellesley, Massachusetts, told People. Others defended the chats as preventative. “You can’t catch anything over the phone,” insisted chat line operator Betsy Superfon.
Still, teens were “accidentally” dialing adult lines specifically designed for hookups. At one point, teen party lines were only one category of phone services — 970 numbers were reserved for X-rated connections, but other 900 numbers offered fan lines for Hulk Hogan or Star Wars, rock ’n’ roll music, sports talk, psychics, or bible verses. Washington, D.C. even had a Bitch Line for people to call and vent about their coworkers or spouses.
Teens loved all of them. “I’m not that popular at school,” Paula, 15, told People. She called in four or five times per day (at $1 per minute). “But I’ve made a lot of friends on the line. I met Eddie, who plays guitar for me, and Brett, who is in a drug rehab center and calls to say, ‘Don’t use drugs.’ But my mother won’t let me give out my address because I’m too young to have a boyfriend.”
Others remember party lines as nothing more than rooms full of teens shouting to be heard. Fourth Grade Nothing blogged that everyone on 550-TEEN always talked over each other in thick Long Island and Queens accents: “‘Who are you?’ and ‘Where are you from?’ Names flying back and fourth [sic], girls and guys yelling out their numbers, ‘My name is Mike and this is expensive! My dad’s gonna kick my ass! Cawl me on my home phone!’ or ‘John, call me, I’m Jenny, 14, from Commack, my numbah is 876–4321.’’”
Meanwhile, the phone companies collected a share of income from each group phone call — about 60%, reported Newsday in 1988. And virtually anyone with a few hundred dollars lying around could buy up a local number, advertise it, and if it caught on, start raking in cash. It was the 1980s entrepreneur’s dream, albeit a risky one.
“My meal ticket,” said Joe Widawsky, who started 540-AMOR, a Hispanic group date line in New York City. With “Donald Trump-like smugness,” Widawsky was convinced his venture would allow him to retire to a Caribbean island. But that was 1989, when thousands of similar numbers flooded the market and teens were starting to lose interest. Widawsky went bankrupt a month later.
Around the same time, party lines hooked up to computer modems and people could type to each other as well as talk. The technology’s popularity allowed a brief resurgence. One party line hosted a wedding, where the bride, groom, and officiant were at different terminals in Manhattan. Instead of throwing rice, the 1,000 callers who tuned in typed apostrophes. “It was very beautiful,” said a party line owner, “and very profitable.”
But by then, kids were bored and onto the next big thing.
