It’s National Landline Telephone Day.
In the landline days, if you were out in the world and needed to call someone, you usually had to find a phone booth to do it – and at one time, college students tried to cram themselves into those booths by the dozens.
This is the kind of stunt that would get over big on TikTok today, if we still had phone booths.
The fad hit it big in 1959 in Durban, South Africa.
A news report said 25 young people from the local YMCA had managed to squish themselves into a single booth, setting a world record.
Of course, when the phone in the booth started ringing, they were all packed in so tightly no one could answer it.
For some reason this painful and counterproductive experience resonated with young adults in the US, Canada and the UK.
These bright young minds put all the brainpower and ingenuity they were supposed to be applying to their classes toward figuring out how to break the South African record.
Some groups started dieting, figuring they could more easily pack people into a phone booth; engineering students worked out the best cramming configurations.
In other cases, people designed “rules” that worked in their favor, like one that said half of a person could be outside of the booth to still count.
The real trick was getting people into the booth and taking a picture quickly; sometimes people at the bottom of these phone booth piles weren’t getting much air.
The craze eventually faded away, but not after large numbers of college-age people also tried cramming themselves into cars, hollow trees and (sigh) outhouses.
Laughing Squid had a great story last week about a stray cat who kept showing up at a lady’s house and pulling flowers off one of her bushes, so she could drop them off at the front door.
Turns out the cat was about to give birth to its litter.
And after all those flowers, the lady inside the house welcomed the mama cat in.
Cramming People Into A Thing: A Photo History (Mental Floss)
Thoughtful Pregnant Stray Cat Brought Pink Flowers to a Woman’s Door Who Then Let Her Inside to Give Birth (Laughing Squid)
There’s plenty of room for backers on our Patreon page, no one will feel crammed!
