There's before everyone had mobile phones, and then there's before everyone knew phones could be mobile.
If you've ever seen an old telegraph office in a museum, that's what phones were originally modeled after. It was fashionable to have a small desk with a pad of paper and a pencil set up in a corner of the house like a communications center, with a big wire leading from that corner of the house to the telephone poles that ran alongside the road. If you wanted to make a call, you went to where the phone was, just like people used to go to the telegraph office. That phone was your connection, and you used the pad of paper to record messages from the outside world.
When I was a kid my friend's house had a telephone in the bathroom, on the wall next to the toilet. You didn't even have to get up! Phones were immovable objects back then. You put one where you thought you might need it I guess.
