You've Reached The Candy Store

In a noble attempt to cheer up his grandson, the rapper with the wandering GPA, my dad noted that kids today have too many distractions, and illustrated his point with the most charming story, one I'd never even heard before, and I thought by now I'd heard them all.  Setting:  A candy store in Brooklyn.  Period: The Depression.  "No one had a phone," he told us.  "If someone wanted to reach you, they called the candy store, and the owner would ask one of the kids who was hanging around to go find the person the call was for, and he'd get a free soda for his efforts."  This scenario, straight out of a Jimmy Stewart movie, brought a smile to the college boy's punim.  There's no candy store app on his iPhone.  Hard to imagine such a primitive form of communicating.  My dad moved the story forward, to post-war California, when he lived with his parents on Highland Avenue, and they finally had a phone.  A very big deal back then.  "You had a party line," he explained.  "You'd pick up the phone to make a call and there'd be other people talking to each other. So you'd say, 'Excuse me, I need to make an important call,' and they'd say, 'This call is important too.' Then you'd start calling the phone company to complain, and maybe, months later, if you were lucky, you'd finally get a private line."  The rapper smiled again.  There was a call he'd like to make, a pointed one, tinged with hostility, to a certain teacher's assistant up in Santa Cruz.