Long before there were text messages, Facebook pages and cell phones, a more simplistic form of telephone communication was the way to know what was going on.

And for some, snooping was the name of the game.

Beginning years before World War II and common until the 1960s, party line phone lines were a common way of connecting people in the outlying areas to others in the community.

In rural areas, party line telephone service was still in use 20 years later, into the 1980s.

On a party line, several households would use the same phone number, but calls for a particular family would be distinguished by a special ring.

Betty McGehee of Natchez said growing up in rural Concordia Parish, party line phone lines were the only way her house could receive telephone service.

McGehee said regular phone lines were available in town, but at Lucerna Plantation, where she grew up, there were four different houses on the party line.

“We were three rings; my uncle was four rings and his son was two rings,” McGehee said. “You’d have to count the rings to know who the call was for.

“But if you picked up and heard something you shouldn’t have, you always could say you didn’t hear the first ring or two.”

It was all family on McGehee’s party line for many years, so, she said, when a call came in for one branch of the family, others weren’t really shy about listening in.

“Phones were a luxury back then, so you didn’t just get on the phone to talk,” she said. “If a phone call came in to anyone in the family, it was probably news for the entire family.”

In town in Vidalia, party lines were out of use by the 1940s, but the telephone was still the way of knowing who was where and what they were doing, McGehee’s high school classmate and Vidalian Corrine Randazzo said.

In the early days of telephone communication, all phone calls went through a central operator’s station in town.

“You had to ring the operator and tell her what number you were calling and she’d connect you,” Randazzo said. “The board was like a big peg board with wires going from one number to the next.

“The operator would answer ‘Number, please’ and plug in the number you asked for.”

In Vidalia there were three operators that handled most of the calls, so Randazzo said, they were the three most informed people in town.

“They knew all the news and the gossip before anyone else because it all went through the phone,” she said. “I don’t remember any instance of them spilling the beans, but you know they knew all the juicy stuff.”

McGehee said eavesdropping on the party line was a sport for some and it was important to teach children how to act when their parents were listening in.

“That phrase ‘children are to be seen and not heard’ was so very true when it came to listening on the party line,” she said. “If there was any noise in the background, you were caught.

“I know we heard some things on the phone, that I would never repeat.”

When a phone call was over, the operator had to disconnect the lines manually, so she had to listen to conversations to know when to unplug the lines.

“Sometimes, if a conversation went long, (the operators) would pick up and say ‘Are you still on?’” Randazzo said. “If you talked much longer, she’d come back on the line and say ‘Are you still on?’”

And since answering machines were still years away from being invented, the telephone operators were a type of human answering machine at times.

“If you called someone and the operator knew they were not at home, she would tell you that and give you a ring when that person got back home,” Randazzo said. “And since the building was right near the middle of town, the operators knew who was in their office and who was out in town.”

But the times of shared phone lines and central operators have long passed and both Randazzo and McGehee said technology has developed too much to ever go back to those days.

Randazzo said back in the 1940s and 1950s telephones were fairly common, but not every family was able to afford the service.

“Today, there are multiple phone lines in a house and a phone in every room, and everyone has a cell phone,” she said. “Then, telephones were a luxury, nowadays everyone can have some sort of phone.”

McGehee said not only has the technology developed too much to ever return to the time of party lines and operators, but people are different, too.”

“I can’t imagine people giving up their cell phones,” McGhee said, noting that she doesn’t understand the need for cellular phones. “People now feel like they have to be at each other’s disposal all the time.”