IT WAS surrender time. I gave in to my partner and signed up our two cell phones for texting.

Our 29-year-old son was semi-sympathetic and semi-sarcastic about this monumental event. “I’m proud of you because I know texting is like Kryptonite to parents.”

Not yet into texting and being against the corruption of grammar, I e-mailed him and said I wasn’t sure I was going to “touch that Kryptonite” because I felt like an 85-year-old man I knew who, in 1960, surrendered and bought a television set. He did it even though he professed, “I know watching it will make me sterile.”

THERE HAS been quite an evolution in phone technology in my lifetime. When I was just a tad, our ranch home had no phone. My grandmother and my great-grandparents resided in the same rural area in which we lived.

About the time we moved “into town,” the residents of that little rural area got telephones. It was a one-line service for about 12-15 users. The battery-operated phones were wooden boxes that hung on the wall. The mouthpiece jutted out of the middle of that wooden box. The earpiece hung in a cradle on the left side of the phone box. On the right side was a crank handle.

If you wanted to make a call, you picked up the earpiece, but held the cradle down with your left hand. Then with your right hand you turned the crank. You had to know the code for each party on the one-line phone service. Each one had a “different ring.”

TURNING THE crank handle created the ring for a given party. My grandmother’s ring was one long and two shorts, sort of Morse code-like. To create a “long” you turned the crank completely around three times quickly. To manufacture the two short rings, you hesitated after the “long,” then cranked one quick turn, hesitated, then another quick turn. If you were calling “town,” you did one long crank and you got “Central,” the real live telephone company operator, verbally gave her the number in town and she’d connect you.

Of course, your dozen or so neighbors could listen in on any of your calls. Or, in the case of a caller/ringer having a weak battery or something, a neighbor might get on the line and say, “Cora, I don’t think you’re ringing through. I’m twixt you and them, so I’ll try to ring on through for you.” “Thanks, Ethyl.”

Moving into town meant we finally had a phone. It was black with a big oval base and one piece contained both the ear and mouth parts. And, we only had one other “party” on our party line. You picked up the ear-mouthpiece and, if you didn’t hear voices, the operator would come on and say, a la Ernestine (Lily Tomlin), “Number plee-uz.” Our phone numbers consisted of two digits, so you gave the two digits that you wanted to call to Ernestine, who would connect you.

When I was waiting at the phone store the other day to get texting, I was reminiscing with a woman my age about the old phone systems. She told me her family’s sharing party had nine children, so getting the phone was a chore. When she picked up the phone and didn’t hear a dial tone or voices, she’d hang up, walk to her neighbor’s house and go right in (“They had so many kids they never noticed an extra one.”), find the phone and hang it up. Then, she quickly went home and made her call.

ALL OF THAT was before rotary dial phones or touch-tone keypads. Now we have cordless phones, call waiting, call forwarding, voice mail and scores of other services in addition to the cells, which can be cameras, computers with the Internet, stock reports and much more.

However, if you see some grey-headed gent texting in a car in a school zone, it won’t be me. So, go ahead and call the police because the Texas Lege got one right last spring and made it illegal to text or even use a cell phone in a school zone.

Willis Webb is a retired community newspaper editor-publisher. He can be reached by email at wwebb@wildblue.net.