About 60 years ago when party line telephones were all you could get (if you could even afford that) and the lines were strung above ground, and relied on ground truly being ground, moisture for conductivity was a necessary part of it.
Long hot summers with little rain would dry out the sandy ground would make for a very poor ground and poor, or worse than usual, phone quality.
The above ground lines were a real magnet for lightning. All us kids were very sure to neither be on the phone, or even anywhere near it, during a storm.
My uncle was seated at the dining room table doing some paperwork when the line got it and the phone literally was blown off the wall, even though no one was on the line at that time.
And another, spookier at the time event was an after-midnight storm awakened my two brothers who had gone into the living room to look out the windows when a relatively near by strike occurred. Much to their horror, a blue ball about the size of a cantaloupe appeared just above the piano in the corner, floated gently down and bounced off the keyboard and made its way slowly across the floor towards the dining room, all over about five or seven seconds by their best recollection, whereupon it vanished with a soft poof.
Turns out that the telephone line ran from the pole, to an insulator nailed to the side of the house on the outside of the wall where the ball of plasma appeared, before coming into the house. Now knowing more about some of the things lightning can do, I assume the pointed nail was a focus for the energy to appear through the wall. Fortunately nothing caught on fire.