When my mother wasn't doing crossword puzzles, shopping or waiting on the rest of us hand and foot, she'd be on the phone, and sometime after they were introduced in 1959 she got this pinkish Princess. One reason was so she could move it around, specifically to her primary domain, the kitchen. These came with an old-style connector, not the later modular type. I'm pretty sure it had the external ringer, as I remember the sound of the dining room wall resonating when it went off. Another feature gave her something to rail about. "Imagine! They make you use your own electricity to light up the dial!" This replaced our first dial phone (dial came late to Larkspur, and we were still talking to operators until 1957), a full-sized basic black model. Mother didn't want to pay Pacific Telephone for a decorator color, so she bought a cream-colored plastic shell for it - think "skin" in today's lingo. As for the Princess, I remember usually having to hold the thing down while you dialed, and we were forever knocking the handset off the base. I shot this negative by available light - mix of daylight and incandescent - on 35mm Kodak Vericolor. View full size.
When my mother wasn't doing crossword puzzles, shopping or waiting on the rest of us hand and foot, she'd be on the phone, and sometime after they were introduced in 1959 she got this pinkish Princess. One reason was so she could move it around, specifically to her primary domain, the kitchen. These came with an old-style connector, not the later modular type. I'm pretty sure it had the external ringer, as I remember the sound of the dining room wall resonating when it went off. Another feature gave her something to rail about. "Imagine! They make you use your own electricity to light up the dial!" This replaced our first dial phone (dial came late to Larkspur, and we were still talking to operators until 1957), a full-sized basic black model. Mother didn't want to pay Pacific Telephone for a decorator color, so she bought a cream-colored plastic shell for it - think "skin" in today's lingo. As for the Princess, I remember usually having to hold the thing down while you dialed, and we were forever knocking the handset off the base. I shot this negative by available light - mix of daylight and incandescent - on 35mm Kodak Vericolor. | Click image for Comments. | Home | Browse All Photos