Oregon trail generation here, and yup! It's been wild to watch tech go from landlines, then add answering machines, fax machines, modems, then pagers, and finally cell-phones. In retrospect, why the kitchen??
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As I remember it as a kid, people spent a lot of time in the kitchen. May have even wanted to chat on the phone while cooking. And there was no real counter space that you wanted to waste with a phone. So that's why they were mounted on the wall.
Had a wall mounted phone in our kitchen growing up. That thing a had a massively long cord, too. You could walk through half the house with that handset. We were little kids running around and nearly clotheslining ourselves on the phone cord pretty regularly.
I commented before seeing your comment. I also mentioned clotheslining siblings. So fun.
Did you play with the cord while you talked, trying to get the cord spirals to line up again?
Odd, I've never seen this in any kitchen.
People who live in homes built in the 90s and earlier usually still have the plug for them. We hid ours behind a picture till we remodelled. If you visit someone in an older home, ask if they have the plug. It should be on the wall more than four feet up just as you're leaving the kitchen.
Sometimes people would buy an extra long cord (they snap into the receiver and base so swapping out was as easy as putting in a usb), and you could walk around the house clotheslining your siblings or stand in place and turn too much getting trapped in it. Fun times.
Ours was red. It was a thing of beauty.
You seem to think everyone lives in the US when most of the world population actually doesn't. It's a common mistake, I know.
How did you get they impression they thought that? They just explained what they had growing up. Lol. Chill.
Nope, I'm not American.