The Red Phone
(201)335-8163
Jersey City NJ
2017

Our first phone number when we moved to Parsippany in 1977 ~ became our Dad's hotline that he only answered when he was on call, especially on the weekends.

Urban Dictionary Definition
Red Phone
The act of screening a call from family, a friend, or common acquaintance. Can have hazardous result depending upon the speed of the screen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotary_dial

A traditional North American rotary telephone dial. The associative lettering was originally used for dialing named exchanges but was kept because it facilitated memorization of telephone numbers.

A rotary dial is a component of a telephone or a telephone switchboard that implements a signaling technology in telecommunications known as pulse dialing. It is used when initiating a telephone call to transmit the destination telephone number to a telephone exchange.
On the rotary dial, the digits are arranged in a circular layout, with one finger hole in the finger wheel for each digit. For dialing a digit, the wheel is rotated against spring tension with one finger positioned in the corresponding hole, pulling the wheel with the finger to a stop position given by a mechanical barrier, the finger stop. When released at the finger stop, the wheel returns to its home position driven by the spring at a speed regulated by a governor device. During this return rotation, an electrical switch interrupts the direct current (DC) of the telephone line (local loop) the specific number of times associated with each digit and thereby generates electrical pulses which the telephone exchange decodes into each dialed digit. Thus, each of the ten digits is encoded in sequences to correspond to the number of pulses; thus, the method is sometimes called decadic dialing.