The Phone Booth

By G. E. Shuman

A weekend or two ago, depending on when in time this column caught your eye, my family and I were on one of our frequent adventures, the purpose of which was to watch our son, Andrew, dunk a bunch of basketballs in a high school AAU game. I’m not going to tell you what the exact location of that game was, as there was something at the place, which I might just want to try to bring home someday, and I don’t need any bidding competition. I trust you, implicitly… I’m just not so sure about that guy looking over your shoulder as you read on.

The thing I am referring to is a phone booth. It’s just not any phone booth; it’s a very old, wooden phone booth. I guess my initial worry about bidding competition on the booth might be an over-reaction. To worry about someone else claiming my prize assumes that there might be interest in such a thing, and, further, that readers these days even know what a phone booth is, (or was).

Anyway, and in any case, I was surprised to see what I saw when we got to the game. There, in an adjoining hallway to the gym, was the old, hardwood phone booth I have thus far labored on about. The phone was, I presume, necessarily gone, but the booth remained; a herald of times long past, a solid, stalwart steward of another age. (Okay. So, I get carried away with my descriptions sometimes.) Yes, the booth was exceedingly old, quite solid, and heavy to the point of over-preparedness bordering on the ridiculous, by today’s standards, for making a simple phone call. It’s very mass and detailed construction amazed me, in that it once must have been felt that the words spoken and heard within the booth held the same great weight. I felt that, somehow, in those days, perhaps they did. As I stood in front of the booth, I briefly felt my front pocket for the tiny shape-outline of the cell phone I knew was there. How things have changed.

I stood, casually examining the booth, and eventually touching the door and opening it. I marveled at the lengths that were once spanned to provide privacy for a simple call. Inside was the wooden wall-mount for the phone, a glass-encased ceiling light, and even a small shelf for counting change for the call, or taking notes. Most noticeable of all was that ingeniously-folding door I had just opened, and also what looked to be an ‘emergency escape‘ door in the back of the booth. I though of how different things are now; how we openly bare everything, (or at least ‘things-telephonic‘) in our present world; of people chatting with friends as they walk the mall, or casually sit in a restaurant. At that moment I was not at all sure which world I was more comfortable in.

Such a booth of hardwood was totally unsuitable for outdoor use, I knew. Outdoor booths were a newer development in telephony, (Yes, telephony is a proper word.) that someone, somewhere, must have, eventually, deemed important. Outdoor booths came to be made of aluminum and glass. As our society ‘progressed’ from elegant calling stations to ones of purer and purer necessity and cost-savings, those metal booths became simple phone-shelters, mounted to poles. The shift was from sheltering the caller, to sheltering the equipment; a societal observation which seems a bit telling, in itself. I remembered the 80’s Superman movie which showed Clark Kent stopping at one of those little phone-posts, and looking bewildered.

These days almost no one uses pay phones. They have all but totally gone the way of the rotary dial and the party line. It’s funny that the word ‘dial’ somehow still exists in the communication lexicon. We still ‘dial’ 911 in an emergency, although no one has used a phone dial in years. Today even our cars, thanks to something called blue tooth, can answer our calls. Technology is wonderful, but a bit scary, at least to me. I’m not at all sure I want to know what’s coming next. To be sure, it will not be a huge wooden phone booth, although I sometimes wish it would be.

Yes, I really enjoyed checking out that old booth, and contemplating a time when mankind was less concerned with portability, and more with privacy and rugged reliability, at least in matters of communication. But I may be giving those people of the past too much credit. They used every ounce of the technology of their day, just as we do now. They were, likely, quite amazed with the technology behind that shiny metal wall-mounted phone. Whether ‘booth’ or ‘blue-tooth’, if you don’t understand it, you don‘t understand it.

Still, as I looked into the booth, I wondered about making a truly private call in such a place, about the people who carved the graffiti I saw there, and why it was that they produced those particular wood-groove etchings in time, as they made their calls. I wished that the spoken words of those people were as-immersed in that wood, to be called back at will. I thought of calls to parents, and children; to bookies, bosses and secret lovers… all of whom are now long gone. I knew that the slang of the thirties and forties, and that’s era’s many dilemmas, all made necessary contributions to those conversations.

Still wondering, but with a basketball game about to begin, I shut the folding door to the past, and slowly walked away.