Going Extinct: Phone Booths and Pay Phones

All thing eventually come to an end.  Some things obviously take longer than others.

Sometimes it's the technology in an item and not the item itself that goes by the wayside.  Cars, for example, have been around for a long time and are still going strong.  Steam cars?  Nada.  Recorded music is still going strong and has seen various formats come and go.  CD's are going strong.  Cassette tapes?  Nada.

Take the telephone.  The basic telephone has existed in our country (and the world for that matter) for over a hundred years, and during most of that time there has been little or no noticeable changes.  Sure, they used to be so basic you had to get an operator to do all the work.  Then they had dials and we did the work, but they were still your basic analog device.  Then we got push buttons.  Still the same otherwise.

Telephone numbers had to keep up with the times too.  They originally only had a few digits, then they added the local prefix code, then the area code.  Who knows what the phone numbers of the future may look like.  Remember the cool-sounding phone number prefixes we used to have?  They always started out with names.  Ours was Temple-3, also known as TE-3, and later 833. There we many others, like Waverly-7, and Sunset-4.  The picture on the right is of the front of a Seattle phone book from 1958, the year they adopted the 7-digit numbering system.  I left it big enough to read if you click it.

Now cell phones have taken over.  Nobody seems to care that cell phones are actually 2-way radios.  What cell phones have done is eliminate the desire or need for most people to have hard-wired phones in their homes.  It doesn't matter that your cell phone rings at the least opportune moment--like when you're sitting on the toilet.  It also doesn't matter that a land-line phone will work even when there is no power anywhere in your city because they are powered through their wires.  None of that matters.  It's convenience that matters.  It's not uncommon for someone that has no job, living on welfare and food stamps, to be seen pushing a stroller along the sidewalk while talking on their $50-per-month cellphone.  They have truly covered the globe.

Although it's happening slowly we are coming to the end of another icon in the history of our country:  We're witnessing the end of the pay phone.

I mentioned it to Suzie some time ago, and she suggested I take the opportunity to start taking pictures of any phone booths I see, and maybe start a blog with them or something.  Well, when I started looking around I realized that I was basically already too late.  The majority of the standalone booths are gone.  I believe I know of one of them still in existence in the whole town of Auburn.  I guess there is just no need for them any longer.  They take up space and are targets for vandalism and garbage.  Someday kids will be watching old Superman shows and wonder why they had those funny glass closets on the sidewalks for people to change clothes in.  Although you can still find naked, wall-mounted pay phones in places like on the outside of a convenience store or in a shopping mall or airport, they are going away as well.

There has always been one at work hanging on the wall in the hallway that leads to the the employee washroom.  A naked, "$1.00 for anywhere in the country for 1 minute" pay phone sitting all by itself.  I really don't remember the last time I saw anyone actually using it, but I'm pretty sure it had been a couple years or longer.   I remember looking at it a few times, wondering if I should go ahead and take a picture of it in case I do decide to start blogging pay phones.  One day I noticed it had a cool-looking spider web on it and I was just about to snap a picture of it for effect.  I went around the corner and there was a guy cleaning it.  Dang.  Well, the day before yesterday I finally took a picture:

As you can see, I missed it.  I guess they left the phone books there to pay homage to the recently departed.

Maybe I'll just capture the essence of the forgotten phone numbers in pictures like this site has.  It's exploration, it's photography, and it's retro.  I like retro.