I love old rotary phones. My parents just stopped using theirs in about 1998.
That said, in July '69 my mom was in high school, and my dad was in Navy Basic. I was a proverbial gleam in his eye.
One of the funniest things I have seen is when a friend who had never used a dial phone asked to use a phone a few years ago. I said 'sure, it's in the hall'. After a few minutes he comes back looking frustrated and tells me there is something wrong with the phone. He tells me that he tried pressing the buttons but the phone wouldn't dial.
He made his call after I showed him how to spin the dial to input the numbers. LOL.
Been a while since I have seen or used a rotary dial telephone. I used to place the handset from a rotary dial telephone into the cradle of a Hayes modem hooked up to a TSR-80 with a 8" monochrome monitor as I remember it. A real step up from the normal 6". Man, that modem was high-tech. At 300 baud it was smoking. LOL.