J. Paul Getty's pay phone at his British manor house, Sutton Place
Posted on 12/11/2021 9:27:32 AM PST by SamAdams76
If you are under 30, you will probably not understand.
There was a time when there were millions of these things across the United States. They were once as ubiquitous as stop signs as you could find on on just about every corner.
Every neighborhood bar had one. Every gas station. Every supermarket, restaurant, post office, convenience store, movie theaters, well, just about every public place you could think of.
And in places where people congregated in larger numbers, there were BANKS of these things. Airports, shopping malls, sports stadiums, and highway rest areas had rows of them!
I'm talking about the pay phone.
They were a marvel of technology in which you could drop a quarter in the slot (or aa dime for us older folks) and get the magical dial tone which would allow you to place a call to anybody in the country. If you weren't calling collect, you'd be prompted to feed additional coins at intervals lest your call be brought to a rather inglorious end. But if you called collect and your call was accepted, your initial coin would drop down into the coin slot like in a old-fashioned slot machine. Well, sometimes that happened, not always.
When I was young and poor, I used to walk around Logan Airport pushing my fingers into every return slot looking for that rare coin. When I found one (and sometimes several), I would get a rush of excitement that was never quite duplicated in my adult years. I also used to snag those baggage carts that passengers left lying around because they were too lazy to return them to the kiosk to get their quarter deposit. I would spend a Saturday morninig at Logan Airport doing this and would make an easy two or three dollars. One time, I found a crisp $20 bill on the sidewalk by where the taxis parked! But now I digress. But my point is, there is free money out there for those who want to hustle for it.
Those pay phones were once everywhere in America. They were also in our pop culture, showing up in many movies and in the verses of many popular songs. Here are some examples of pay phone showing up in songs:
Back when there were millions of pay phones in America, you could make a career of being a pay phone technician. Most of your service calls would involved cleaning chewing gum out of the coin slot, alcohol wiping handsets and unsticking buttons on the keyboard clogged up with people's sweat and who knows what else. But you would occasionally get a challenging service call which would involve taking the entire phone apart (453 replaceable parts!).
I would say that the early 1980s were the heyday of the telephone. Kids at the Crabtree mall would call their parents to come pick them up from a video arcade, with the sounds of PacMan and Space Invaders in the background. Anxious teenage girls would call their parents for a pickup from a date gone bad. Businessmen would get alerted with their newfangled pagers and have to scramble to the nearest payphone to retrieve their message. Stressed housewives would call their husband at work to say they their car broke down on the way back from their hairdressing appointment and was towed to a gas station by a guy named Al who is sitting outside in his idling Chevy Caprice waiting to drive her home (and hoping to stop for a drink or two along the way).
On military bases, soldiers would be lined up 10 deep waiting to use pay phones for that 10-minute phone call to mom. At bars, men would phone home to say they were "working late tonight" and not to wait up and the wives would then wonder why "Tush" by ZZ Top is blasting in the background with a bunch of clinking glasses. At airports, many were calling home to speak of flight delays and such. Occasionally, one would use a payphone to call in sick to work on the way to a fishing trip.
There used to be a time where you never left the house without a dime (or a quarter) so that you could place an emergency phone call if you ever needed to.
No mystery to it. It is quite simple. With the rise in mobile phones the reduced demand did not justify the costs of maintenance, collections and repairs from thievery.
I just threw mine out about a week ago. I think I got it in about 92. I didnt realize I was still carrying it around. Im not even sure that the phone company it belonged to still exists. On second thought maybe I should have used it as the basis to sell NFTs based on antiques.
J. Paul Getty's pay phone at his British manor house, Sutton Place
J Paul Getty knew how to maximize the bottom line.
Dude stole a half million dollars from payphones in 23 states.
As I remember the way they caught him was that he had this weird habit of chewing an entire bottle of aspirin a day.
Dude was a folk hero.
I would prefer a landline home phone over my cell. I would rather have a pager and pay phones, and would switch over if it were possible.
Only once has GPS directions on my smart phone been perfect. Just 3 days ago my Wife went on a 148 mile trip to visit a friend in the Hospital. The app sent her 10 miles in the wrong direction, but got her 95% of the way there. I don’t trust them and never have.
Just tryna keep things real. :0)
Pay phones were taken out to facilitate the need for cell phones.
So what do you do nowadays if you’re out and about and need to make a call but don’t have your cell phone or the battery’s dead?
For movies with payphones, how about the club scene in the original Terminator. There’s that bank of phones right off the dance floor and the music is blaring and every phone is taken (IIRC).
I think you would need to borrow somebody else’s cellphone.
Early 90’s, the family and I are going into a Po’ Folks in the Nashville area, and in the “lobby area” (Area between 2 doors to the inside) there was a pay phone. My 6 year old son picks up the receiver, punches a bunch of buttons, and it’s like he hit a slot machine. I don’t know if the coin path was jammed, and his punching of the buttons enthusiastically dislodged everything, or if that particular brand of phone “featured” the ability to empty it via secret code.
That’s about the only option, but it’s not a very good option. I’ve done it before and it’s awkward. Also not sure how things might work out late at night in a sketchy part of town.
In the early 90s our office paid an additional fee to send text messages to our pagers. The idea was if you were out in the field and a call came in for service nearby the secretary could just text you the instructions via her desktop.
All she ever typed was, “call the office” so they canned it.
Yes, phone GPS is certainly less than perfect. I have been misled by it as well.
But with my lack of good directional sense, it has certainly saved me a lot of hassles too.
At first all we could send to pagers was our callback number. Later we moved to text pagers which allowed us to send 150 characters, with contact information, a basic problem description, etc. The reps could also acknowledge the message with the pager. That was much better.
I didn't have one but my friend did.
Back then, their methods weren't hard to notice ... sudden scratchy connections, loss of volume, and out-of-place background noises at times.
One of the few p[laces that accepted incoming calls in the 90s. Some.
At a gas station on my way home from work there was a pay phone by the gas pumps. One day a few years ago I walk over to it and saw that there was no phone installed. It was just the pay phone box as seen in this example:
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