[SamAdams76]

[knarf]

no mystery at all . . . . . . cell phones

[GreyFriar]

Cell phones and, especially in larger cities, increased vandalism and theft of phone money boxes.

[DoodleBob]

We're doomed.

[dblshot]

I remember when girls put dimes in there penny loafers in case they needed to call home.

[\/\/ayne]

[stuck_in_new_orleans]

What thick moron writes a blog wondering why pay phones disappeared?

[PIF]

Your link goes to another and different story on FR

[caver]

Nice little story......

[BobL]

The BEST PART about pay phones was that men could travel on business, do what needed to be done there, and their wives would never know...

Now that’s next to impossible, dammit.

[knarf]

Many of us learned the value of carrying around a bobby pin with the ends scraped clean of that plastic crap .... so I could stick one end in the speaker end of the handset and the other just ground out somewhere on the phone ....

dial tone !

[combat_boots]

In the early 90s, in San Fran, I needed to make a call. Every pay phone I stopped to use had its cord cut.

I haven’t been back.

[Leaning Right]

Pay phones used to be everywhere in my neck of the woods. Then my state deregulated the telephone industry. I guess that was around 1990. All of a sudden a local pay phone call went from 15 cents to three dollars (not kidding).

That’s when I first thought about buying a cell phone.

[tet68]

I can remember my parents keeping an alarm clock by the
phone when making long distance calls so you didn’t run
over three minutes.

[Celtic Conservative]

Caller ID killed all the bogus calls like cheating on your wife and calling in sick from the bowling alley. But it also showed up in time to keep me from getting called in on my day off when I was a rookie cop.

That’s okay, they still managed to hold me over often enough!

CC

[E. Pluribus Unum]

[Telepathic Intruder]

Yeah I miss those things, like a lot of things. But also like a lot of things, don't need 'em no more.

[Fury]

We still have 3-4 at one customer site.

Why? Tip and Ring.

In emergencies, battery from a CO can still get the job done, when cellular networks are dealing with the equivalent of All Trunks Busy or Reorders, etc.

[\/\/ayne]

[Dr. Sivana]

There was an episode of the Brady Bunch when Mike installed a pay phone to get the family to be more judicious in its use.

As far as checking the slot for a dime, there was a NYC "Sportsphone" ad where you called a pay number to get current scores instead of waiting for the radio news station. Lou Piniella was a spokesman. After he makes the call (976-1313), hangs up crying "They won!", he checks the pay phone for money.

There is a web site called Payphone-Project that notes still operational payphones. I contributed the photo below from the Wisconsin DOT in 2014. The phone booth likely dating to 1964 with the phone itself being from the '80s or '90s. A new DOT was built, so I doubt the phone is there today.

[Allegra]

Yep. And I’ve always had a bad sense of direction.

Back before GPS was easily accessible and we wrote down directions to places we were going for the first time, I could often be counted on to miss a street or make a wrong turn somewhere.

I usually just found a pay phone, called someone at my destination, told them where I was and asked for updated directions.

It was last century’s version of “recalculating.” LOL