I'm sure this has been discussed 100,000 times here, but I'm not privy to them, so.......
Before cell phones were ubiquitous, was ham, and even CB, used more often for more useful purposes?
What I mean is, if you were driving around, and saw an auto accident, would you call it in with phone patch, or ask someone on a base station to call it in?
I remember sending people to phone booths, (which were ubiquitous) to call for help, but I'm wondering if radios played a larger part in that sort of thing.
Delta
Oh, let me tell you, the answer is a resounding YES!
I got my first "real" CB (aside from the 100 mW Channel 14 toys) around 1974 and a little while later, got to hearing "KAAT1936, Hudson County Monitor" who was this official station on CB channel 9, He would sit on the radio getting calls for accidents and breakdowns along Manhattan's West Side Highway, which was across the Hudson River from Guttenberg, NJ.
I finally got to meet "Hudson County Monitor" who turned out to be another kid who was a year older than me. I think I was 12 and he was 13. Over a friendship spanning several decades, revolving around radios, volunteer activities, work, and relationships with various women, we would frequently reflect back on CB radio and how important the kid version of himself played in the region. He grew up to be a police lieutenant and an extra class ham, (and my best man and the person I named my younger son after...) and died in the World Trade Center 14 years ago. Up until his death, he still kept a CB radio and would occasionally guard channel 9 in case anyone needed help.
After I became a ham in 1978, I joined the local repeater club. It had an autopatch, which was a very big deal. These were the days of IMTS phones, which only "very important people" had. To be able to make a telephone call from your car or HT framed someone in a different light (it also impressed the girls, but that's another story). Along with that unique ability came the social responsibility of calling in stuff when you came across it. It wasn't soon after that this club, one of the larger organizations in the New York City area, appointed an "emergency coordinator." That person was a New York City EMS EMT (and later paramedic). In the days before 9-1-1, he dug up all of the communications center back numbers and they were programmed into speed dial. You could bring up the autopatch, then hit the speed dial and instantly ring into the dispatcher for NYPD, and a number of other surrounding towns in New Jersey, Westchester, and Nassau Counties. There was a learning curve, though. I remember the training session where we were encouraged to explain, "I am a ham radio operator making a radio telephone call. I can't hear you when I'm speaking, so you have to wait until I stop talking before you can talk..."
Not long after, I went to work in EMS, myself, and put up my own repeater with autopatch. We had a notoriously bad "telemetry" radio system (the UHF MED channels) before it was all centralized. My partner and I were "working up" a patient with ALS (advanced life support). I went through a protocol up to the point where I needed to speak with the doctor. The APCOR was as useful as a wheel chock. No telephone near by. I had my IC-4AT in my back pocket and was able to hit the repeater. I called the medical control physician by autopatch and was able to get the order to go further in treating the patient. When I transferred over to NJ, I was able to do that a few more times. Some of the other guys I worked with also got their ham licenses and did it when, for whatever reason, everything else didn't work.
I was also on a fire department and found autopatch very useful in having to speak with a foreman from the electric utility during an emergency.
So, yeah, ham radio and even CB made a big difference in the past. Not to mention, CB and ham radio repeaters were the original social media of the time. Friends, current and former co-workers, and various strays all kept each other company in their comings-and-goings, and into the wee hours solving international problems (it was a time of Hostages and the Cold War), sharing technical tips, talking about the new computer fad, and generally hanging out.
I took a job in the Midwest and moved out in 1996. At some point our careers turn us into migrant workers if we're not fortunate to work a "keeper" job close to home. The repeater stayed up past 2001, maybe into 2003, but people drifted off, married off, or died off and things changed.
I bought my first cellphone in 1991 (it was a Motorola brickphone, and eventually I scaled down to a thinner brickphone). I was cautious, because in 1982 I was a subscriber on a manual operator-assisted phone system and racked up a $300 bill just by playing big shot and calling my friends. Unlike now, phone calls cost big money back in the day. My friend, the former "Hudson County Monitor" got his first cell phone around 1994. I suppose my last autopatch call was in 1996 just before I moved. I still have that controller (it was actually two controllers - a Connect Systems, Inc. and an RC-96), and it's still set up with speed dials to the various police departments (a carryover from my first ham club days) and to each others' homes and girlfriends at the time.
Thanks for making me think of happy times.
A place far in the future
And faces from the past
And children reading history books
Their faces light and laugh
It all seems so primitive
How did you survive?
It all seemed so different then
How did you stay alive?
-- Primitive Cool, Mick Jagger