A Life in Four Colors Part Forty-Seven

235-9546.

More than fifty years later, I still remember this number.

That was my phone number. My very own phone number. For my very own phone. In my room. Listed in the phone book under my name. Paid for with my money (okay, not totally--my parents offered to pay the first four bucks of the cost, and I paid the remaining almost-five-bucks myself).

So why did I need my own phone?

If you guessed "Susan," you're beginning to figure me out.

By the spring of 1969, Susan and I talked to each other all the time. We continued to write each other as well, but the letters decreased to one a week as the phone calls increased. We talked about comic books (we both liked Spectre and we were both enjoying Teen Titans more by Neal Adams & Nick Cardy than we had liked it when Bob Haney was writing it; I liked Silver Surfer and she couldn't understand why; we both hated to see Legion of Super-Heroes come to an end in Adventure Comics; Batman was getting better; Susan--who didn't like Marvel--agreed that the Fantastic Four was still the best book Marvel published), we talked about science fiction (I liked Heinlein better than Asimov, while Susan ranked Asimov higher, but we enjoyed both), we talked about television shows (we both loved Hawaii Five-0 and Mission: Impossible, neither of us cared for The Mod Squad, and I liked Get Smart much more than Susan did--but I've always had a soft spot for sitcoms)... and we talked about each other.

Problem was, my dad was a sports editor for a local newspaper that covered sports for more than a dozen local high schools. Dad had a staff of one full-time sports reporter and two part-time sports reporters. Do the math and you'll see that there was no way that he could have covered all those games himself, nor did he have the staff to do so. That meant that he used stringers who were paid per game to phone in vital info and stats to him at home on game nights; he would type up the info, then turn it into a story that would appear in the next afternoon's Rome News-Tribune. And that meant that Dad needed the phone line to be open for incoming calls. So while no one else in Susan's family used the phone very much and thus our increasingly long conversations weren't a problem on her end, they were more troublesome on my end.

So I proposed that perhaps I should have a separate phone line in my room. And my parents weren't opposed to the idea, if I was willing to cover part of the cost myself. (I think they weren't wholly opposed to the idea of the phone since I was spending so much time talking to a girl as nice as Susan--my parents liked her a great deal from the first time they met her.) Some quick calculations and I said yes. I was earning more money around the house for mowing the lawn, raking leaves, sweeping the driveway, and other miscellaneous chores, so I could make room in my budget for a dollar and a quarter a week for a phone.

The big advantage, as I saw it, was that Susan and could talk about each other more--and we could do so without others listening to my side of the conversation. There was little privacy when I talked on my family's home phone--and my sister found it particularly amusing to hang out near me when I was on the phone, as many eight-year-olds are wont to do just to annoy their teenage siblings--but with my own phone, I could close the door and talk to Susan as long as we wanted, and we could talk about pretty much anything.

There was one flaw in my logic: while I had my own phone, Susan didn't, and her phone was in the living room where everyone watched television.  Her solution? Buy a long cord for the phone so she could stretch it out to the screened-in porch, where she could at least get some modicum of privacy.

Not the perfect solution, but it worked. So by the spring of 1969, we were not only talking about comics and books and television shows, we were also talking about how much we liked seeing each other. And we were making plans to see each other much more after I got my driver's license in August 1969.

Six months earlier, I hadn't even particularly cared about getting a driver's license right away. But by the spring of 1969, I couldn't wait to get my license.

My own phone. My own license in the not-too-distant future. Might not seem like much, but it was an indication that my life was beginning to change, and Susan was the catalyst for those changes--just as she would go on to be the catalyst for almost every good change in my life in years to come...