Phoning home 15 years and 35 miles later A STORY WORTH TELLING
“We can only blame ourselves for all the crime and violence today. We removed all the phone booths and now Superman has no place to change.”
— Author unknown
Comfortably seated at a Nacogdoches restaurant a few years ago, my eyes absorbed the antiques and vintage signs adorning the old warehouse-turnedeatery.
I had dined there many times, before a brief detour in the Hill Country. That night, however, my casual scan locked onto one conspicuously familiar piece.
“What are the odds?” I murmured.
Fast forward to last week. A KLTV Channel 7 news report on an icon of times gone by reminded me of that night at the restaurant.
According to the story, bewildered crowds in Gilmer were attracted to a sight that prompted calls from curious residents — many of whom confessed they had never seen anything like it.
The tall glass enclosure looked just big enough for a single person to stand inside where a crude, hardwired telephone hung.
Passing youngsters called it a donation box or a primitive ATM, before an older gentleman recognized it immediately.
“Pay phone,” he said.
“That was once the only way to make a call away from home.”
Public pay phone booths shaped U.S. communication and culture for more than a century and were everywhere— airports, bus stops and train stations.
By the late 1950s, wood gave way to sleek glass-and-aluminum structures. In both forms, they were also once the lifeblood of journalism. Hollywood loved the trope of the frantic reporter rushing into a phone booth to dictate a scoop before the presses rolled.
The last time I played that live-action role was in 1997 in Washington, D.C. I was covering the U.S. Court hearing of “The City of Boerne v. Flores”— a legal battle over a church building permit and historic preservation which I had covered.
Arguments concluded, I snapped a few photos, then sprinted toward the nearest pay phone where I dictated the story to our editor back at the Boerne Star. Thanks to the humble pay phone, our hometown weekly broke the news the same day as the major dailies.
By the mid-1990s, the U.S. boasted more than 2.6 million pay phones. Then came the communications revolution: Cellphones put a phone booth in everyone’s pocket. The death blow came with the 1996 Telecommunications Act removing subsidies, effectively “hanging up” on phone booths for good. Today, it’s estimated that fewer than 100,000 examples remain nationwide, fading like ghosts of an analog world.
Reminded last week of that night at the eatery, I turned to my dining companion and said, “See that old wooden phone booth over there? I had one exactly like it in the game room of a house I sold in Center back in 1990. Mine was a ‘stand-up’ model from 1937 with phone numbers scratched into the metal near the door.”
Jotting remnants I could recall of those numbers on a napkin, I then walked across the room. Reaching the folding glass door, I stepped inside. I recognized the familiar, bare, unshielded fan and light fixture.
I folded the door shut and looked above the casing. There it was. Stamped clearly in the data plate: 1937.
Beneath it, still perfectly legible, were the phone numbers I recalled.
The old phone booth I once enjoyed had found its way into a restaurant some 15 years and 35 miles down the road from where I last saw it.
Murmuring again, “What are the odds?”
Contact Aldridge at leonaldridge@gmail. com. Other Aldridge columns are archived at leonaldridge.com.
