I was looking at my telephone bill yesterday and realized I’m paying too much for a phone. Really too much for being able to talk just about anytime from anyplace in the world. You see, just about all of my communications are via cell-mobile phone systems. I don’t have a land line.

When I finish typing this, I will send it off via my cell connection and in nearly an instant it will be at SCVNews.

In fact, I’ve not a single telephone or cable line coming in to my house. As long as my TV can reach the satellite and my “air card” device has a cell tower nearby, I can communicate by phone, fax, video calls, emails, Facebook, etc.

I’ve been in places where I’ve got only my generator to supply power and I can watch reruns of “I Love Lucy,” surf the ‘Net, call friends and talk on a video conference, too. I’ve also ordered parts to be delivered at my next stop.

We hear from all of the “experts” that divorce rates have gone up because couples aren’t communicating. We sure have a lot of ways to communicate today. Oh – they aren’t communicating with each other.

Not that many years ago – or maybe it was – I carried a phone card so I could charge calls to my home phone when I was traveling. Didn’t have to search for change when using a pay phone. Do all y’all remember what that was? The card and the phone?

I carried a pager, too. Neat device, a pager. It was something I loved to ignore.

Sometime in the mid-1980s I was issued a cell phone. It was the size of a World War II hand-held radio and weighed about the same. It complemented my pager and that huge laptop computer stuffed into a thick briefcase. Oh, another term you might not know. “Briefcase” is a suitcase for lots of papers and things carried by someone who wanted to impress someone else.

Thank the stars I didn’t fall overboard when I carried all of that stuff on and off a submarine or ship. I would guess it added nearly 50 pounds of weight. Just a little too much for me to try to swim with.

When I was transferred to my first nuclear powered submarine, USS Thomas A. Edison (SSBN 610) in 1970, I found out the boat had a switchboard for telephone lines that could come to the boat. I never saw it in operation. Since the boat was in Rota, Spain, we had only two active lines coming to it. One was a general number, and the telephone was in the Control Room. The other “shore phone” was in the captain’s stateroom. By the way, this was the same submarine that had the piano in “crew’s mess” or, if you must, the ship’s restaurant.

In nearly six years on that boat, I think I used the shore phone twice. It was easier to go to the Phone Exchange on base and call home. I’d give an operator a slip of paper with the number to be called and she – it was always a she – would call my name when the call went through. Sometimes I waited an hour or more. It was a time to sit there waiting with a cup of coffee and a cigarette.

Submarines in those days had many ways to listen to radio traffic, but when it came to sending stuff, we were still in the dark ages. Once we thought we might have to have a sailor sent off of the boat for medical reasons. The transmitter was warming up, a task that could take up to 24 hours. And we would have to send the message in Morse Code. The sailor got better and the transmitter was turned off.

Communications capability for the military and civilians progressed at a rapid pace over the years. The soldiers and sailors of today can call home from just about any place at any time. This old sailor still gets a kick out of talking via webcam with the grandchildren.

I can’t complain about that phone bill. I’ve seen my oldest grandson hit a home run, granddaughter No. 1 ride a horse, grandson No. 2 running in his yard, and granddaughter No. 2, well, be just the cutest kid in the Western Hemisphere.

To think I get to see my grandkids as they are doing things in Kentucky and Virginia and there isn’t a wire connected to anything to do that. I also can hardly feel the weight of the phone. (I know that because my cell phone has been in a pocket of my cargo shorts, and I couldn’t feel the weight and thought I had lost the phone.)

I get to see friends and family. Send and receive emails, watch a movie, and do most things that used to take equipment enough to fill a large living room. All that, and it can be lost in a pocket, purse, backpack or glove compartment.

It means Superman has to change clothes out in the open because phone booths are long gone. It’s a fact that if you remember a phone booth, you might be considered old. I remember them only because I saw one in a picture once. Yep, a real moving picture. Must be true; it was in the movies.

And all of this must be true because you’re reading it on the Internet. Well it is, mostly.

Darryl Manzer grew up in the Pico Canyon oil town of Mentryville in the 1960s and attended Hart High School. After a career in the U.S. Navy he returned to live in the Santa Clarita Valley. He can be reached at dmanzer@scvhistory.com and his commentaries are archived at DManzer.com. Watch his walking tour of Mentryville [here].