Watch Teens On The PHONE In The 1950s 

“Been drinking many sodas lately?” *Flirting +100*

“Been drinking many sodas lately?” That just killed me. Lol! At first I thought it was just a dumb thing to say, then I realized it was shorthand for “Have you been going out on dates at the Burger Joint with other guys specifically this Siggy guy?”

“Been drinking many sodas lately?”

Next time I call my friend I'm gonna be like hey girl been drinking many sodas lately? He's gonna be flipped.

I grew up in the 90's and we had the same phone, in the kitchen, mounted to the wall.

In the 1950s, parents were probably saying things like, “Instead of talking on the phone all day, you should play outside!”

Nowadays, I don’t even bother calling if there’s no agenda. That’s more of a text message level of communication.

I could literally watch these teenage conversations for hours

Sounds like how my dad talks on the phone lmao

There were seven of us in the house back in the 70's... Three teenage older sisters. And it was a freaking battle every time the phone rang! Who would survive to answer it!? Me and the others would sit and watch like it was Tuesday night wrestling. Life was great back then lol!

I remember in the day , calling girls & hanging up on them because I was so shy ! Then , I would compose myself & call them back.

"Sort of in the middle of something" a minute ago literally sitting on the couch waiting for the phone to ring lol

As a young adult living in the 21st century I often find myself romanticizing my parents and even grand parents for having grown up in a time void of all these smart technologies. Having a personal pocket-sized computer has its benefits don't get me wrong I just think they've rewired human interaction. This type of generational shift is inevitable but I believe that for both my generation and those to follow, having all these phones that distract us has been harmful to our society and personal relationships. I've noticed among my friends and family that often times looking at a screen is common when interacting with one another and even my younger sibling would rather watch RU-vid videos all day. Though I've also fallen victim to the addictive qualities of having a smartphone I try and remember to live life as if it were the 90s. It's important to keep in touch with life beyond the screen and relearn how to live life and interact with others in a way that's deeper than an almost secondary interaction next to our smart devices. Thoughts? Does anyone sometimes leave their phone at home and go out and fully immerse themselves into the world? I call it, having a 90s day :p

Asking her if she's been drinking alot of sodas lately means has she been to "the spot" alot lately. The spot being soda shop or drive-in joint.

I grew up in Europe in the 60s and 70s. There was no phone in my home (as with many of my contemporaries) until around 1978. It was regarded as a luxury, not a necessity; moreover, not only were calls expensive (you paid by the minute) but also the line rental was astronomical. There was quite a divide between America's phone system and the rest of the world.

Mr. Hoffman, I am 45 years old. As a child of the 80’s, I see striking parallels with my parents’ generation: 1) We called each other with no agenda. Just to talk. The lucky kids had cordless phones enabling them to move out to the porch or go to their rooms. 2) Girls wore their boyfriends’ class rings around their necks too! And would you believe that as recently as 10 years ago, I was training 6 year old Tiger Scout Boys on how to answer a telephone appropriately! Great clip, thank you!

The very first phone I remember was a rotary phone that sat in the kitchen in 1950s. Party lines, operators asking what number? Then in 61, my parents had a house built, the phone was rung in the kitchen. That same phone was still in the house when mom (2007) and dad 2014 died. We had the same phone number 1961 to 2018, when the house was sold. Much simpler, family friendly after WW2 era. Stay safe all, we live in a crazy world. At almost 70, I can understand why my parents hoarded away not food but canned so much. Really worried about not having enough in garden, 36 chicken layers, 2 hogs, a large cow. But will make due. Staying with family on their farm.

Oh man Edward, Lucy was so thirsty for ya, but you called Lucy to get Jane Patterson's phone number. Lucy is so disappointed by that!

Thank you David Hoffman!!! There ain't sh*t on RU-vid interesting since I watched the last David Hoffman video this morning on Peter Thomas. I love the old footage from the 50's and 60's. Please dig deep and share with us anything you've got!

I remember when public phones suddenly changed from a dime to a quarter.

Imagine traveling back in time 35 or more years and telling people, "In the future, everybody will have a phone in their pocket... but 98% of the time when they use it, it will not be for making telephone calls." That would seriously confuse the hell out of people.

“You’re flipped” lol what?

I was born in 1971 and remember lying on my bed talking for hours on the phone with girls for when I was a teenager. I remember when I got my own crib one of the first things I bought was a telephone. I remember my first pager (a Motorola)and then my first rudimentary cellular phone. (A. Nokia) then I got a Motorola flip phone that was so sophisticated. I remember the first cellular phone i had that had internet access but barely could display anything. I remember my first touch screen phone that was an HTC Evo. THAT'S right about the point where cellular telephones started costing more than a decent laptop computer. Now we have literally every bit of information we could want right at our fingertips. What an interesting sickening world we live in

I remember watching a video a few years back about the evolution of the phone, from switchboard operators to those party lines to everyone getting their own private number. Absolutely fascinating.. Another great video, David.. Thank you so much for sharing❣️

Your videos, as always, continue to provide an extraordinary window into times and cultures now since past. Thank so much for this channel and all its content.

Who remembers the "Party Line"?

“I can’t guarantee my presence in your future” I gasped

I love taking my phone and calling people. When you're speaking to someone on the phone it's more genuine. There's less room for bs and "reading between the lines". I'm 23, not sure if anyone else around my age feels this way? Seems like most prefer texting. Cheers

Our telephone used to be on the kitchen wall also, Phone numbers were written all over the wall around the phone. If you needed to write down their number it was jotted down the wall with their name, after a while you knew right where to locate their name on the wall sometimes you had to search to locate it like a collage of phone numbers. My mom was fine with it she’s the one that started it. If our mom was searching for us if we were at a friend all you had to do was go to the wall and she’d have our friends phone number. Also I remember most phone conversations were short and usually about where and when we were going to meet to do something.

In the 80's it was a big deal to have your own phone line in your room. I guess parents didn't want the phone tied up. That of course was before call waiting.

David, absolutely fascinating! I too wish you had more of these interviews. These are the children of what Tom Brocraw called, The Greatest Generation”. I was one of those kids. I still remember our phone number back then in the fifties. It was simply, 203. That number actually designated that we were the two hundred and third family to sign up for phone service. In our small town of 450 I guess that put us squarely in the middle class. As you stated, the phone was located in the kitchen, mounted on the wall. At that time we had what was called a “party line”. There were four or five families in that particular exchange on the switch board so when someone called us the phone rang in every home on the party line. Proper decorum designated that once the proper person was identified the others on the line would hang up. In reality that seldom happened which created a fairly productive gossip mill. When something of importance was being discussed it wasn’t unusual for someone listening in to offer an opinion. Regardless the communication was a boon to the town. It was a few years later that the lines went private and teenagers became obsessed with phone communication. As a boy I wasn’t inclined to spend hours on the phone as my sister did. There was also a beep signal that designated an incoming call if you were talking to someone. In that instance you were supposed to hang up in order to accept the incoming call. If I wanted true privacy I never used the home phone but went uptown to use the Phone booth on the town square. For a dime you had 30 minutes of call time. At the end of the time you had to insert another dime or the operator would cut you off.

Thanks, David. I grew up in the 80s and 90s and the phone was it for us too.

My Dad was a teenager in the 50's and he loved to call up and talk to me on the phone, sometimes multiple times a day, just to chat or say hi. I always loved that about him, but watching this video is like a breath of fresh air, and helps me see that habit of his in a new way.

Great film ! In the UK most working class people didn't have a phone in the house until the mid 70's ,and we would get half the street knocking , asking to "borrow" the phone. I like the woman's photos , the comb in the Bobby Sox included ! It's great to hear the teens talking for real , not staged and stilted like in the teen exploitation movies of the time like Hot Rod Gang etc.

3:18 “Been drinking many sodas lately?...” So hey... do u want to go steady still?

I was a lucky kid, in 1974-5 l worked hard on my Dad's fishing boat, 12 years old l was able to afford my on phone. For a 12 yr old it was glorious.

Nice to see you David. I hope you and yours are safe and well In these terrible times.

This was great.. so funny to see peeps using "new" technology!

It seems history repeats itself. I too, like many of the others, can remember the landline telephone being king of common communication. I was lucky to get a small taste of computer modems from one of Dad's co-workers, in the early to mid 1980s. I guess the biggest shift for me was indeed seeing cell phones move from a luxury item to just about everyone having one, and it didn't help that my wife and I started out quite poor. Until the government extended subsidies to cell phones, I repeatedly ran into people that couldn't understand why we didn't have one. Even when we got one through said subsidies, we either had to tell people ONLY to call our cell in emergencies, or, we just didn't give out the number. In the past ten years, we found that if we gave out a cell phone number, everyone we knew would call that number FIRST. With crummy reception and 250 minutes a month that was only expanded recently to 350, people still defaulted to "everyone has a cell phone, everyone has a calling plan with unlimited minutes" and they seemed slow to understand "hey, we have limited minutes, and they'll run out... call the landline phone".

Your videos are always a delight David, thanks so much for your charm and humour. Great content too

I absolutely love these! Thank you.

I really love your channel. Thank you for being one of the coolest “old dudes” on the internet and for preserving history with your films.

These types of phone conversations still exist in the form of facetiming between friends and/or potential girlfriend/boyfriends. I feel like not alot has changed other than the tools we use to do the same thing. Same way everyone in public places is on their phones now instead of with a newspaper. That's just my take on it. I could be wrong. Sure the whole "drink any sodas lately" thing sounds silly to us nowadays but it's a reflection of the culture at the time. People still have the same kind of "nonsense" conversations during idle chit chat.

i find David truly remarkable. he reminds me so much of my father. so unbelievably smart and incredibly passionate about what he does. these videos are a joy to watch.

@David Hoffman - Many years ago I found your channel by hitting on the great clog-dance video. Since then I have been served with so many dear memories. Even though I am from Western Europe (the Netherlands), the American social fabric and styles were very relatable. Now 67 I am also pleased to see how you present these older videos. Not 'just' posting them as they are (which is already a good thing), but embracing them with your present day commentary. Precious little gifts. Thank you.

Absolutely love this channel! 😀

Never thought I’d be so excited about watching teenagers on their phones.

Great seeing film of teens hanging out in malt shops in this video! I remember 'old school' malt shops still in existence in Price and Brigham City, Utah in the mid to late 1970s! There were probably scattered malt shops throughout the nation even then.

Love it!! Thank you so much David! I really enjoy these kind of videos. 😊😁

Wow this is fascinating! Thank you for sharing.

i love your work so much. thank you

LOVE THIS CHANNEL!!! Thanks David for the great content! Subscribed!

I think the culture of 1995 had more in common with 1955 (forty years earlier) than 1995 will have in common with 2035 (forty years later) because of the exponential growth of technology during the latter. I'm a 90s teen and there wasn't that much difference, except for answering machines and pagers.

David, I really enjoy watching your historical content in pictures and sometimes videos. Keep up the good work. I am a Genealogist and history buff anyway, and your collections are very rich...Love it! David keep sharing, and keep up the good work. It is much appreciated.

I can imagine when phones first came out. That must have been unreal! Very exciting. New subscriber. Very happy to have found this channel. It's opened up some things for me. Now I'm looking at Nina Leen prints.

I really love your videos, I feel these videos are really hard to get by.

This channel is a time machine, amazing

David, you're a very Interesting man and I orgianlly started watching u because of your connection with Maine, which is where I've grown up and am raising my two sons. U also have a vast range of other interesting subjects. Thanks

Thanks David , great to remind me how innocent we were , I remember I had to go to pay phone station to call a girl I liked 25 years ago , I knew the operator was listening , then I had to put in another .25 , where we were our telephone lines were shared by 5 other partys after that . Thanks for the memories

Cool photographer lady. Thanks for sharing.

This reminds me of the telephone scene in Bye, Bye Birdie, which is so much fun and one of my favorites from a musical. Thanks for sharing!

I love these films you've captured the era extremely well.

My mother-in-law still had rotary phones in her house in the 1990's. I sort of miss them!

You are awesome ty and happy Easter 🐣

Man how I wish I could’ve just experienced the past first hand; I’m 17 years old right now in the year 2020; turning 18 in December. I’m obsessed with the past, and just wish I had friends like that back then that wouldn’t stab me in the back. People just seemed so much nicer back then, and with way more proper language pronunciation. Ugh

Excellent video. Thank you.

Eddie Haskell vibes lol

Isn't it interesting how the phone once bought us closer now it's pulling us farther apart?

Lovely clips! Still have my pink princess phone and a landline. Phones were such an important way to connect with friends, still are.

I love your content, keep it up!

Enjoyed this. Thank you!

I hope your videos/films with your commentary make it into the library of congress. These are VITAL to understanding our roots as a country and society.

This is amazing!

Great video, thanks! It's like the girl at the end was posing without knowing perhaps. GREAT shots!!! I always imagined the earlier generation thinking about the telephone the same way we thought of cell fone when they 1st. came out. Impersonal maybe? Or self-important? We had a 2-party line in the '60s. For you younger folks, it's a shared line w/the neighbor!

I’m 16 years old, so I grew up mostly in the 2010’s. It’s so fascinating to see how similar the adult reaction to teens on phones back then was to today’s adults reacting to my generation being on smartphones and tablets! I guess it just shows how the cycle repeats until the end of time, haha. I wonder how my generation will react to the new technologies of our children when we’re adults. (Probably the same way.) Thanks so much for sharing this!

Thank you sir! Great look into the past.

Im unsure why, but those times seemed simpler. I know they had other struggles. With much gratitude & appreciation Thank You, Mr. Hoffman Stay healthy & Safe HEALTH IS WEALTH ❤

You should do a follow up and recreate this with some teens of today. This was great.

Remember my Grand dads phone. Weighed what seemed to be 20 lbs as I recall. The clicks of a rotary is a sound never forgotten.

Those photos are brilliant.

OMG GOOSEBUMPS!!!!!.......U R EPIC DAVID

Local calls were cheap, long-distance calls cost one to several dollars per minute. It would stay that way until modems became popular in the eighties.

You are the best keep them coming

OMG the party line. I don't mean where you call to find a rave. You shared the line with others in the neighborhood. I remember my father needing to make a call. This woman was on that yacked forever. Finally he blew his top and started yelling at her to get off the line.

When my grandparrents first got married in the LATE 1960s they moved to a small unincorporated community that still used the wooden box phones with the separate ear and moth pieces with a crank on the side. Goes to show that there can be a very long transition period from one technology to another.

Seeing content like this is always so interesting to me...

This was very interesting. Did you talk on the phone a lot, Mr. Hoffman? That last bit about how the girl would move around so much, and then the photographer saying it was unbelievable, was quite funny.

My grandfather had a private line put in our family home back in about 1934. To this day a cousin of mine lives there. Still with the same phone number. Numbers not letters as then. But yes when my mother was young back way before the 1950's teenagers had phones to take to there friends. Bell phone was founded in 1877. So shortly after that people started having phones in their homes. I would bet teenagers tuck advantage.

"Have you been drinking many sodas lately? What? WHAT?!" Brilliant conversationalist 😂

You are amazing! I love your work. -From a Millennial

And now im watching you on my phone 60 years later in my room

I am 23 years old and it is an honor to be able to see things from the past. Awesome videos sir!

Many wonderful memories! Long, lingering calls lasting into the night, almost falling asleep, not wanting to hang up. Long distance calls, expensive and a real declaration of affection. Waiting and waiting for a promised call...and finally getting it with a sincere apology for the delay. And best of all...hearing great news that my brother was alive!

We had a first wall phone in 1992! Unbelievable looking at it now. I felt strange talking on the phone like that girl on the video. Another fascinating thing is that 8 years later I got myself my first mobile phone.

There is still nothing like slamming down the receiver on a Western Electic desk phone after an upsetting conversation. The last time I recall doing it was when there was a computer on the other end that wasn't acting right just a few years ago. And I drink sodas all the time hehe.

Nina Leen is amazing. I have a mid-century fashion Facebook group and feature many of her wonderful photos. As for phones, I have an early '60s pink rotary dial in my bedroom and love it.

I am 42 and when I see these films I can compare how the computer influenced my generation. The pros & cons of any advance in technology. We live in an amazing world, thank you!

I was a teenager in the 80s every time the phone rang my mother or father would answer with strong italian accents enough to scare any future boyfriend away. Not to mention anytime a boy did call for either myself or my sister the interrogation would begin, "hoo wassa dat boy watta that boy wanta wich u" but i wouldn't change a thing. These days kid's are doing God knows what on every social media and dating site, parents havent a clue, just hope and pray they dont come across some looney.

In the 80's we didn't have a phone. Most people I knew didn't because they couldn't afford it. So, even then, it was exciting when I got to use one. In the 90's I spent most of my time on a pay phone, with my GF. That's when beepers were popular.

I can’t guarantee my presence in the future either.