Most Americans love smartphones. We surf the Internet at any time, take cute photographs of children or embarrassing photos of spouses, check the latest scores or play games.

I do not have a smartphone.

What I love about cellphones is not having to pay extra for long-distance calls.

Ask, “Is that a long distance call?” to anyone under 30 and they’ll probably blink twice and return a blank stare.

But for a half-century and more while I was growing up, it cost extra money to make a telephone call in Pennsylvania from DuBois to Clearfield, or from Brookville to St. Marys. And it cost a whopping extra amount of money to place a call from DuBois to, say, Washington, D.C. or San Francisco.

So, we didn’t.

Unless something serious, perhaps tragic, occurred, we never spoke to family members or friends who were more than a few miles away.

Back when I was a kid, Mom actually walked through the downtown area of Warren with money in separate envelopes. She stopped at the garbage company, the electric company or the telephone company and she emptied each envelope of the exact amount needed to pay the utility bills. Then, she would return home and place the envelopes in the top left-hand drawer of the desk in the living room. Each payday, she would put money into each of those envelopes. When the bills arrived, she would adjust her estimated contributions to match the dollars and cents of the bill, and then make another monthly trip to those offices.

Sometimes, after I had accompanied her, we would stop at the old Savoy or Blue and White restaurants and get glorious slices of high-topped coconut cream pie.

But if the telephone bill had been inflated because a long distance call had been made to Mom’s sister Julie who lived in Erie, there would be no pie. Money was that tight in those days.

So Mom wrote letters to Aunt Julie, and received letters in return.

Telephone calls were reserved for crises: “Our sister Katherine is in the hospital,” or “The funeral for Uncle John is going to be held on Saturday.”

We just did not call to ask, “What’s up?” or “How are you?”

These days, I make six such calls every Tuesday night, and my telephone bill does not change by a cent.

Granted, a cellphone bill is higher than a landline bill. But it is stable, since neither my wife nor I require the data associated with smartphones.

So I can make voice calls to my children: Chris near Philadelphia, to Matt and Natalie near Washington, D.C., and to Mike, Theresa and Greg in Warren. We can chat as long as we like, ranging from a few minutes with Greg to a half-hour with Natalie.

My wife doesn’t make many such calls. Instead, she takes advantage of another cellphone feature: text messages. It is common for her to send and receive close to a dozen text messages a day from her four sisters and three children.

In the “old days” of only landline phones, she would have been able to talk to just two of those sisters without extra charges that could range from 50 cents to $5 per call.

I love hearing the voices of my children and, on occasion, the voices of grandchildren. Fifty years ago, that was unheard of.

When they travel back to their homes from a visit to us, those children invariably let us know that they arrived safely. Text messages usually suffice. “Home” is all that needs to be typed.

When I was a college student, we had to connive and possibly cheat the telephone company to accomplish that.

When I arrived at my apartment in Erie, I would place a “collect” call to Mom’s house in Warren.

Ask a young adult today about placing a collect call. You’ll receive another blank stare.

In those days, picking up the receiver brought the voice of a live person onto the line.

“Number, please,” the operator would say. “I want to place a collect call to George Bonavita at (no area code) 723-7144,” I would say.

The operator would ring my mother’s telephone. She would answer. The operator would announce, “Collect call for George Bonavita. Will you accept the charges?”

Mom, of course, would decline. “He isn’t here just now,” she would say. I would hear that, the operator would hear that, and the three of us would hang up.

There was no “George Bonavita,” of course. The operators and mothers themselves knew that this was shorthand for, “I got to Erie safely.” And no extra money for a long distance call would appear on Mom’s bill.

There are many good things about cellphones, smart or not.

For my money, the ability to talk with people all across the country without incurring extra charges is the best feature.

Denny Bonavita is a former editor at newspapers in DuBois and Warren. He lives near Brookville. Email: denny2319@windstream.net