[IIsi50MHz]

Now that you mention it, I did vaguely used wonder why some phones took longer to hang up than others. Some, I would hear the receiver go onto its rest, and 'immediately' hear a dial tone. Some, it took a few seconds.

Related to what some other commenters pointed out…

- The delay did seem to get longer when call-waiting became avaliable in an area.

- Sometimes, right after pressing your own hook and then releasing it, I could not dial; I had to wait a couple seconds.

- I never used a system where you could hang up and have time to run to another extension, but I may have known a couple people who claimed they could? If so, I probably dismissed it as "weird".

- My direct experiences were with various regions of just three Bells, so another commenter's remarks about LA/PacBell were interesting.

Thanks, everybody, for jogging my memory a bit.