Are you a lemon or a peach on the party line?

This is the last page of the July 1950 telephone directory for Kingsville, Texas. The Southwestern Bell Telelphone Company lists the do's and don'ts for the polite use of party line telephone service, which was still widespread in the United States at that point.

You're a LEMON if, among other things, you refuse to give up the line during an emergency (and you could have been criminally charged, too, I might add).

You're a PEACH if you extend courtesy, teach your children phone manners and generally just follow the golden rule. 

Like many members of Generation X, I suspect that I mostly learned about party lines by watching midcentury sitcoms. The Andy Griffith Show and Dennis the Menace are two in particular that used them as plot points.

In a 2017 article for the Adirondack Almanack, Lawrence Gooley provides a humorous anecdote about how some party line systems worked when it came to calling your neighbor:

"Calling someone on the same party line was an interesting adventure. If you can believe it, you dialed their number, hung up your receiver, and waited until you thought the person might have picked up their phone (it was basically a wild guess), at which point you picked up and said, 'Hello?' If no one replied, you waited a bit, and if that didn’t work, you either assumed no one was home or you started all over again. What a great system!"

Seems it would have been easier to just go knock on their door.