I just reread something I wrote 5 years ago. It was payphone related, on the payphone site. It was not very good. I sound like someone else in those stories. Why don’t I just write like I am, and stop trying to impress people with my apparently bottomless knowledge of the subject matter? In fact I know a lot more about the subject than I let on in the actual payphone web site. But that is intentional, for to save the good stuff for the book which it looks like I will never actually write.

I lost a lot of the outline. Virtually all of it, in fact. I have no idea why or how it happened but everything was gone one day, replaced with nothing but a dot. The cloud backup was gone, too. For some reason I felt no loss whatsoever. I could start over. A lot of the research is saved via newspapers.com and other bookmarks.

I was just describing my idea for a bar, an idea I came up with long ago. It would be called “Sorabji’s Place” or maybe “The Piano Mafia.” Mimicking the style of Jimmy’s Corner, the pugilist-themed bar on 44th Street, this place would be all about classical piano music, with pictures of the greats baked into the bar and a jukebox that plays nothing but carefully-curated music from the hands of such smashmouth luminaries as Raymond Lewenthal, Michael Ponti, and early to mid-1940s Horowitz. It would be awesome.

Having a moment of “I don’t want to be anywhere.” I was actually doing well enough at home but chose to come out here from habit, I guess.

Going to try this instead:

My earliest memories of payphones are from the mid-1980s, when I was in high school and then college. During the summers my father and I drove all around central Florida, looking for payphones. This was in the years following the deregulation of the payphone industry. For the first time pretty much anyone was allowed to set up a payphone anywhere they thought made sense. This was a bold departure from the established monopoly the Bell Telephone systems had, and it came a year after the breakup of AT&T.

Driving past cheap motels and chain convenience stores our generally sincere exploration of where it might make sense to stick a payphone became something of a running joke. Any time we saw an open area on the side of the Interstate or an unoccupied stretch of sidewalk we would point at it and say “You could put a payphone there!” or “Aw, man, someone coulda put a payphone there.”

My father was, like a lot of people, always looking for some easy way to make some passive income on the side. He had no delusions of great wealth.

I don’t know what his research into the matter turned up, but he ultimately stayed away from the business. I think he decided it was already too late to get in on the action, as the business had been quickly taken over by the early entrepreneurs who had prepared for this opportunity long before the FCC mandate was issued.

Some have said that deregulation of the coin telephone industry was the beginning of the end of the payphone. I guess that depends how you define failure. The quantity of payphones from 1984 to the mid 1990s increased exponentially, but who was really making money at it?

Deregulation does seem to have tarnished the reputation of the payphone as a public utility. Private payphone owners were allowed to charge whatever they wanted, they could use whatever telephone gear they chose, and there was virtually no accountability. This combined with the openly cantankerous David vs. Goliath relationship between independent payphone service providers and the local Bell companies created an atmosphere of false starts and uncertainty. Some people actually entered in to the business in the spirit of sticking it to the big telcos, with _____ of Tonka payphones openly declaring his contempt for Ma Bell.

But the disdain was not limited to the PSPs. A very strongly worded letter from ____ called the payphone industry out on its shenanigans, describing the individuals who flocked to the business as something akin to snakes, encouraging them to slither back under the rock from which they came.

Crappy Payphones

While researching this story I enlisted the help of a librarian at the NYPL’s business library. I mentioned the subject of payphones and the deregulation of the business in 1984. He commented “I remember that. Crappy payphones.” I laughed, thinking that those two words pretty much said it all in describing the post-deregulated world of public telephones. Make no mistake, when public phones were operated entirely by the Bell companies they were routinely out of order or damaged, just like they are today. But they offered a more or less uniform experience at predictable costs. That situation deteriorated almost immediately when the independent owners stormed the scene. Calls that used to cost a dime could be double or triple that price, collect and third-party calls could be routed through unscrupulous operators at outrageous expense, and phones could be programmed with any number of gotchas that encouraged excess coins to be deposited or calls to be terminated before they even began.

One notorious trick — which is actually still in play on some payphones to this day — is to make the first several seconds of the call sound silent to the person you are calling. The caller could hear the person answer but that person heard nothing. Thinking it was a mistake they just hung up, and the payphone swallowed the coin.

The dysfunctional relationship between PSPs and the Bell companies should seem a little strange, given that the PSPs were actually bringing fresh business to the phone company. Each payphone location required, needless to say, a telephone line, and none but the Bell companies could provide that. But the new scenario was fraught with hazards and logistical problems, and PSPs were often left waiting for months before the phone company would install the copper phone line.

____, The Payphone King

For all the initial confusion and unsettled business plans some people actually were making money at this. By far the biggest winner was ___, whose early and aggressive entry into the business led him to publish Private Payphone, a trade journal for the industry that later was renamed to “Public Communications Magazine. The pages of that magazine are filled with sometimes laughably ambitious goals for the business, such as declaring the 100th anniversary of the birth of the payphone a national holiday.

The magazine also opens a window, admittedly one-sided, into the gritty spade work of mining  for that most important element of a payphone’s success: Locations. The success of a payphone could rest almost entirely on its location, but the Bell Systems, firmly entrenched in high-traffic spots like bus terminals and shopping malls, were not in any hurry nor were they under any obligation to just surrender any of them. Thus it came down to the salesmanship skills of the individual owners, who essentially went door to door soliciting interest from restaurants, bars, and just about any business with a roof over its head. If the Bell company owned a payphone at a particular location then the sales pitch had to convince the business owner that they would make more money by switching from a Bell phone to one of the newer privately owned models. These new phones had extra features, such as an LED screen that displayed a readout of how long your call had been connected and, perhaps, information snapshots such as the current weather or the time of day.

Another trick, which endures to this day, was to lure callers into dialing toll-free numbers. These calls, which cost the caller nothing, earned the payphone owners roughly 50-cents per call. Today’s payphones are commonly plastered with long lists of toll-free numbers one can call, and this revenue stream accounts for a significant take for certain payphones.

This 50-cent loophole exists because of an FCC ruling mandating dialaround compensation for payphone owners whose equipment and leased phone lines are used to connect calls that essentially cost the payphone owner money.

It has also been at the center of a number of scams, where payphone owners program their phones to automatically dial toll-free numbers en masse. This little scheme — which you could probably get away with forever if you don’t get too greedy — put Washington D.C. payphone owner ____ in jail, and his was hardly the first such incident of payphone scammers getting busted for exploiting this loophole.

The public reputation of payphones also took several beatings from other scams, most notably the ETS Payphones scam, which bilked millions of dollars from mostly elderly individuals who were promised rich returns on their investments in that company’s phones.

And, increasingly during the 1980s and 1990s, payphones became associated with low-level crime and specifically drug dealing. Accurate or not the connection between payphones and drug dealing is inextricable. The reason hoodlums and guttersnipes might be drawn to the payphone is obvious: Anonymity. Calls to payphones could not generally be traced to their location by anyone but law enforcement or a telephone operator. But if Jimmy the Jointman is calling Paulie the Pothead it’s not likely that the latter would be able to trace the location of where the call is coming from. The scenario enters into other situations, such as runaway children calling home, cheating spouses hoping to obscure their location, etc. These situations were, in fact, an enduring reason for maintaining and continuing to develop The Payphone Project web site and match as many payphone numbers to their locations as possible. It just did not make sense to me that this information should be kept as some kind of secret when its value, however small a niche it occupied, was genuine.

…

Yeah. I can do this, right?

Need food.

…

Page 181 is from WASH, by the somewhat curiously named Margaret Wrinkle. The page is the title page for Part Three of the book, and reads

Early summer, 1815
Two days’ ride north of Nashville

I went to Nashville once in college. It was part of a tour that a new music ensemble went on. Tours and the student musicians chosen to go on them were kind of a badge of honor, as I recall, though I never quite understood why. I think I went on two or three of those.

Really do need to eat…