Phone Home

Sit back, relax, as we now travel back to yesteryear, to a simpler time before cell phones and the self esteem movement in child rearing.  Imagine it is 1992 and your IBM PS/2 with its 20 megabyte (yes mega, not giga) hard drive is running DOS at 486 mhertz and your 750 Kbyte (yes kilo, not mega) 3 1/2 inch diskette is still more useful at data storage than serving as a coaster for your coffee mug.  A time when people knew what the a:\ and b:\ drives were. 

It was a bright spring day, the kind of weather when your troubles don't seem to matter and your lips are whistling a happy tune in spite of the slow driver in front of you.  Tammy and I were cruising down Highway One in California, and if we had coughed up the money to rent a convertible instead of a Cavalier, the wind would have been blowing through our hair in that carefree way that only Hollywood starlets usually seem to experience.  We were young and had just been married seven years.  Nothing could touch us.  But in spite of our carefree attitude I decided I should check in at my office.  My assistant, Debbie, had been manning things while we were away.  Of course this involved stopping at a gas station for a pay phone where I could use my calling card.  When I called I got the answering machine and I left her a mumbled message to the effect of “where the hell are you as I am paying you to answer the phone” and “we are headed to Lassen Volcano National Park so I will be unavailable for two days”.

Debbie and DOS

Two hours later we pull up to the little ranger kiosk located on the entrance road, sixty miles from the nearest highway, and there, taped under the sliding window, is a sign written in black Sharpie, on typewriter paper, that reads “DR. FEUER, CALL YOUR OFFICE”.  As my jaw hung there, the little window opens and as the ranger is about to extort the $10.00 entrance fee (kidding, there were no fees back then for bush league parks) I meekly ask, “The Dr. Feuer from New Jersey?  Because that is me.”  He then proceeds to inform us that "a" Debbie tracked us down to inform Tammy that her Mom, while in San Francisco, has had a heart attack but she is stable and doing well.  Of course there is no phone at the ranger kiosk so we had to drive another five miles to the visitor center to find a pay phone.  Tammy finally reached Debbie and it turns out Debbie had been waiting by the phone all morning for my check in call.  Just when she stepped out for a few minutes to get lunch, I had called.   She received my message but all she could understand was “we are going to volcano “.  Because no traveler in those days could be reached directly, Ralph, my father in law, tried to track us down through Debbie when Kitty had her heart attack.  Debbie then called California information and told the operator (there was no web searching either) she must get in touch with her boss who is driving to “some volcano” in California.  Thank goodness the operator took her seriously and she helped Debbie to figure out that it must be the National Park in northern California.  She connected Debbie to the ranger headquarters and Debbie explained the situation.  They agreed to radio (via walkie talkie) the kiosk and have the ranger there place the sign.  And that, Virginia, is how we existed before cell phones and the internet.

 Tammy calling the hospital from Lassen Volcanoes National Park

 
But here is the human interest aspect to this tale of ancient messaging:  I made Tammy wait for an hour before we drove  to San Fran so I could at least walk a few hundred yards up the volcano to get my picture taken and thus “claim” the park for my life list.  She tearfully and reluctantly agreed, but she waited alone in the car .  True story.  I reasoned that Kitty was apparently okay and we would never come back to this remote park so this was my only chance.  Plus what were the odds that we would coincidentally be only a few hours from San Francisco?  If we had been back home in Jersey we couldn’t have seen her mom anyway.  We finally arrived in San Francisco and thankfully Kitty was her usual perky self. But while Tammy tended to her Mom in the hospital I rented a mountain bike and rode across the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito.  Hey, when would I ever again have a chance to do that?  A few years later, it turns out, when we went back to San Fran.  So,  my apologies to Kitty and Tammy, and posthumously to Ralph.

Coincidentally, before our trip, when Tammy found out that her parents would be in San Francisco at the same time as us, she said to her Dad, "We can meet you for dinner in San Francisco."  Ralph replied , "I'm not flying 3,000 miles across the country to have dinner with you."

I can only speculate that if cell phones were around back then, and Ralph could have just called us directly, we would have immediately driven to San Francisco to be with Tammy’s Mom. And I still, to this day, would never have been to Lassen Volcano National Park thereby adding going to all the National Parks to my list of almost dones.  And by the way, we did offer to go to China Town for dinner with Ralph, but true to form he refused.  We ended up having dinner with him in his hotel, as he had previously planned.  I believe he understood my stubbornness in not having Kitty's medical emergency impact our itinerary.  And Debbie still works for me twenty years and ten computers later.