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 respectable momma would let a girl go out on a date without a dime in either her shoe or her bra.
Or to collect ransom that kept Dirty Harry running all over the city.
5¢ ding
10¢ ding-ding
25¢ bong
We’ve been watching a lot of old TV series episodes such as Kojak. Strange to see them run to a nearby pay phone to call the office.
I still have my land line phone and no cell. When I am out of touch I wish to be out of touch. I do not want to hear, “Why didn’t you answer your phone?”
We had two lines - one listed, one unlisted for the hospital, answering service, or other select callers to use. We could use the listed number as much as we wanted.
When I was in college (EE of course) we “fixed” the payphone on our dorm floor with a switch between two of the wires to defeat the money collection in the coin box. The coins you put in would come back to the change slot.
Someone reported the phone as out of order and the phone guy came in. At lunch time he asked us if we’d watch the phone. It had the front off. We then found out where the relay arm was and took measurements. It was a simple matter to drill a small hole at that location to close the relay with a paper clip. Then the coins would just go through and come out the change return.
There were a few other tricks involving diodes, etc. Some of the foreign students made free calls back home. Of course, I never did anything like that.
Was it in a dead area with no cell service? After phone booths were rare in most areas, rural Amish areas would have them for emergency use. Apparently OK to us a phone, just not to have one.
We use to use little egg timers... when the sand was almost to the bottom you had to end your call.
We had an unlisted line as well, which was strictly for “official business”, but a lot of calls still came in on the listed number.
The three-minute limit was pretty much impossible to maintain once we reached adolescence, though Dad would still grumble about tying up the phone.
Drug deals. Joke's on them. Security cameras are used to match faces to the monitored calls.
About 3 decades ago we spent close to 2 weeks in the Devon and Cornwall area. We loved seeing the red phone booths often in the middle of no where. My wife had some card that she could make calls back to the states with it. The time share inn had a couple of red phones around the property, and they sold us the cards.
Are those red phone booths still in the UK?
We love old Brit tv mysteries and joke whenever we see a red phone booth. I ask my wife if she has the card or vice versa on seeing the first red phone booth in a Brit tv series.
NRQZ
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