My Mom's Experience With A Phone Creep

So I am sitting here watching a documentary on a man who is serving 30 years for being a serial stalker of 2400 women, and assault on at least one; and in the course of this, naturally, they interview an expert ... who includes 'telephone harassment' as a form of stalking behavior.  That immediately reminded me of when that happened to my mother, in the 70s .... and - even tho it resulted in the changing of our phone number - it actually had quite the funny story that my mother could never quite live down --

When I came home from school that day, my mother sort of leapt at me, and said in an unusually high-pitched voice that I was not to touch the phone - at all!  I was relatively young - I wasn't even a pre-teen sitting on the phone yet - and, in fact, with very few exceptions, I don't think I even made too many outgoing calls, so this sounded odd.  Nervously, my mother confided in me she had a dirty phone caller.

"Oh, I saw this on tv!" I exclaimed, telling my mother she needed to call the phone company and --

My mother smiled.  "Jeannee, Mommy has a plan!"  

My mother was then a lunch aide in the school system.  Finding out quickly alot of kids were so wild at recess a poor housewife could get a sore throat yelling at them, she took to wearing a police whistle on a lanyard around her neck.

Yep - that was her plan -"I'm going to blow his ears out!"

Oh, boy!  Considering the often-troubled relationship mom and I had even then, this was an infrequent moment of what would be called today 'girl power'///sisterhood !

Less than a half hour later, the phone rang ....

"Hello?" said my mother.

She listened.

I watched her listening.

She raised her whistle - blew me about out of the dining room!  - and slammed down the phone.

Still kind of shook, she quickly went back into her bedroom and lay down.  

The house was still.  I was probably either doing my homework or reading a book (or both), about a half hour later, when --

The phone rang.

I just knew it was safe now, so I answered it.

"Ahhh, Jeannee, this is Uncle Howie .... yeah - listen - is your mother mad at me? ... Because all I did was say hello, and she about broke my eardrum with some kind of whistle!"

;D  ;D  ;D  ;D   "Ah, Mom?" ..... ;D  ;D  ;D  ;D