jairey

Actually -- Local rates were very low. "Ma Bell" was required to make it financially possible for everyone to have a phone ("universal service") -- so while there were no bells and whistles and, as someone else commented, that might mean sharing a line with others, but you could get service for $5 a month. Now, long distance was extremely expensive and the extra funds were used to cover local service. Companies came along that could offer lower rates for long distance, but actually bought bulk access (cheaper) from "Ma Bell." As people began to go to the cheaper long distance servers, the funds to support cheap universal service went down. The following effort to change this resulted in the 1984 divestiture and then the later trivestiture etc. etc. That said, from where they were located, I would doubt there was a phone line run to the location. You did have to have a line run, and that was a whole other story. Some rural locations were beyond the reach of a physical line from the Switching Center working, and the "remote line carriers" like the SLC-96 were just being developed. That was up to the "local" phone company -- which might, at that time, still have been a mom and pop operation, not a big local one. So putting in a request might have had to come from the owner of the property, not from a renter (which I believe they were?). It would, IMHO, have been easy for him to convince her that they just couldn't "get" a phone. Speaking as a former Western Electric/AT&T/Lucent Technologies/Bell Labs employee :-)