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.
I’m a 90’s kid too LOL. Probably spent $5 a week just to call girls because my parents get annoyed when classmates (and girls) would call the landline so I did them a favor lol. Then the advent of the pager..
Back in the 1990s I worked in the field service dispatch center for a medical equipment company. The reps carried pagers and our initial attempt to contact them was by paging. Cellphones were rare then and coverage areas were limited, so the reps relied on a landline somewhere —often a pay phone—to contact us. I worked evenings and I remember one rep, who was on call that night, checking in to say he was headed to Miles City, Montana, about a four-hour drive. He was out of pager range the whole trip and told me he would check in again at the next pay phone—about two hours away.
I bought my current house in 1997 from a guy who had one of those red tele booths in the living room. My wife made sure he planned on taking it with him.
re: “Also, you used to be able to receive calls on pay phones. War on drugs put paid to that... “
And pagers - get a page, find a pay-phone to make a call to the number on the pager (back when it was numbers only) ...
after that the pizza place became an adult book store.
.........................................
Must have been a upscale neighborhood!
My father and I used to have a signal: call on the pay phone, let it ring one time then hang up...meant it was time to come pick me up from the movies or wherever...then I got the dime back! Take that AT&T
I was last in London in 2010. The red “phone boxes” were still all over the place.
I asked someone if people still actually used them. He told me “mostly tourists - for taking pictures.” 😏
For 20 years I kept a landline in my home primarily because of the alarm system. I finally called my alarm company with whom I’d been the same amount of time and said “cancel my subscription.” I said, “Because you guys cost too damn much a month and on top of that I have to pay $60 a month for a phone line I don’t need.”
Guy on the phone transfers me to the “Customer Loyalty Representative” and I explained my reasoning. Long story short? They dropped my monthly rate to comparable with cheaper ones near me AND they installed a cell-phone link system FOR FREE. Called the next day after installation and dropped the landline.
Somebody start a thread about party lines!
virtually destroyed the entire landline network.
.............................................
I recently cut down four telephone poles for landline wires that used to come off the state road down into my farmhouse. Took the wire to a metal recycling operation and made fence posts out the poles.
When your local pizza place becomes an adult bookstore, it’s a clear sign to put your home on the market.
My grandmother had a party line in northern Alabama up to the mid 1970s. I have some stories to tell. Especially about "Aunt Edna" down the road a piece.
It was a nickel for a local call in Louisiana in late 70’s early 80’s.
I never heard that bobby pin work-around thing before. (How many people now even know what bobby pins are?)
Yeah I miss those things, like a lot of things. But also like a lot of things, don’t need ‘em no more.
.................................................
There’s a great Amos and Andy Show where a phone booth plays a central role. Hilarious!
On 9/11/2001, in New York City, supposedly the cell phones were unusable due to congestion and loss of the Towers. Payphones worked though.
That was due to the street drug trade. Pay phones were used to set up deals and deliveries. People who lived or had businesses nearby cut the cords to discourage such usage. Some phone companies disallowed incoming calls to certain pay phones to cut down on the vigilantism, but that wasn’t enough.
I’m gonna guess you were near Greenbank.
There are still some here and there around the five boros of NYC if you look and they get used too. No idea why that is.
We kept the landline for two reasons. One for the security alarm system, and the other was that you could always use the landline when the power went out, which it did often where we lived.
Then one day the power went out and I tried to call the electric company on the landline which I had done probably 100 times over five years. No dial tone. Dead. When I called AT&T they asked if anyone had been in the area laying fiber optic cable. Yes; they had. They said landlines on fiber optic need electricity for some reason.
Cancelled the landline. Had the alarm company set us up for cellular connection.
I miss the landline.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.