You might remember the old saying about how something has "gone the way of the buggy whip," meaning there's just not a real big market for it anymore. I came to the realization the other day that just like the buggy whip it's been a while since I've seen a pay phone.
Remember them? There used to be one on almost every corner, in every mall, airport, bus station and bowling alley in the country. Today they are an endangered species.
The first "prepay" telephones were installed in Chicago in 1898 and by 1902 there were 81,000 of them scattered across the country. Their popularity grew, and soon phone booths began popping up on street corners and inside various establishments. With the invention of the booth, you could now make a call in "private."
The first booths were wooden and were designed with comfort in mind. In the 1960s, their design switched to glass and metal for a more modern look and the Bell system installed its one-millionth pay telephone.
In the early days, a local call could be made for just 5 cents and it wasn't until the 1970s that the fee was raised to 10 cents. There were no two-year contracts, shared minutes, roaming fees, rollover minutes and, thank goodness, no family plans. If you needed to make a call, you simply stopped at a pay phone, dropped in a dime and phoned home. The good news was that, if nobody answered, you got your dime back in the coin return.
As kids, we discovered that visiting a bank of pay phones could be as good as a treasure hunt. We couldn't resist walking up to a pay phone and pulling the coin return lever. We always hoped to find money in the coin return slot. With a Coke and a Hershey bar each costing a nickel, finding a coin in the return slot could really make your day.
I can fondly recall teaching my own children the same game of checking the coin return slots. While on a family vacation and waiting for a flight in Chicago's O'Hare Airport, I decided to have a little fun and help keep the kids occupied. Across from our waiting area was a bank of a dozen pay phones lined up against the wall. While the kids were distracted, I went to the line of phones and placed coins from my pocket in the return slot of each of the 12 phones. Returning to the waiting area, I suggested that the kids go and check the coin return on the phones. You would have thought they hit the jackpot in Vegas! It wasn't until later that they figured out "old dad" had put one over on them. They still remember the prank to this day.
As a salesman in the '70s, I knew where many of the pay phones were located in my territory so that I could call my customers from the road and check into the office. I can recall thinking that things had really gone high-tech when they installed pay phones that could be driven up to, enabling one to make a call without getting out of the car. That was great on a rainy day. By 1998, pay phones reached their peak, topping 2.6 million across the country.
Alas, all good things run their course. Somebody took comic strip character Dick Tracy's two-way wrist radio idea and developed the cell phone. By 2001, BellSouth announced that it was getting out of the pay phone business, making it the first major phone company to do so. In December of 2007, AT&T; stepped up and declared that it was going to sell its remaining 60,000 pay phones, stating a desire to get out of the dwindling business.
I guess the pay phone is sort of like the old buggy whip. You can hardly find one anymore, but then, that's what they call progress.
Ed Hungness and his wife owned their cottage on Fife Lake for six years before moving there after his retirement in 2005. His writing draws from life experiences and a love for the outdoors and northern Michigan. He can be reached at edhungness@yahoo.com or care of the Record-Eagle.
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