“Dig This, Julie! It’s the latest platter that Earl Cut — and plenty groovy sugar”
– Bobby Gets Hep, Bell Telephone Systems Comics, 1946
Bobby Watson is hogging the Party Line. In a cautionary tale told by Bell Telephone Systems Comics in 1946, Bobby, a fan of band leader Earl Watson, is telling Julie about the start’s latest recording and his own big plans to meet his hero and get the gal.
So Bobby gets hep. No, not hepatitis. That for later. According to Cab Calloway’s Hepster’s Dictionary: A Guide To The Language Of Jive (1938), Hep is groovy and:
Hep cat (n.): a guy who knows all the answers, understands jive.
You dig?
Bobby is a victim of phone culture. The Irish Times once claimed that the new technology “encourages, and even requires, a graceless brevity of expression”. The author Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island, complained in an 1889 letter to a newspaper that the new technology had invaded “our bed and board… our business and bosoms… bleating like a deserted infant”.
In the early days of telephone use, multiple users in one geographical area might share the same telephone line, called a ‘party line’. If your neighbour was making a phone call, you could pick up your own receiver and listen in on their private conversations.
There were fears that this could lead to more crime, with people listening in to find out when occupants would be out of the house so it could be burgled.
Bu Bobby is about to experience something worse – far worse!
