If you are a slightly more mature Geocacher (I didn’t say older) you may remember the phone booth. In the decades preceding the advent of the cell phone, the use of a pay phone at a phone booth was the only way you could make a call when you were not at home. In many neighborhoods there was a phone booth on almost every corner.
In 1889, the first public coin telephone was invented by William Gray and installed at a bank in Hartford, Connecticut. The invention quickly caught on, and by 1902, there were 81,000 payphones in the United States. By 1905, the first outdoor payphones with booths were installed. By the end of 1925, 25,000 of these booths existed in New York City alone. In 1960, the Bell System installed its one millionth telephone booth. After the divestiture of Pacific Bell (California) and AT&T in 1984, it wasn't long before independent stores selling telephones opened up. After that privately owned payphones hit the market. In 2000, there were over 2 million payphones in the United States. Today that number is around 500,000, the major carriers AT&T and Verizon have both exited the business, and this market is served by independent payphone companies now. In many areas you will be hard pressed to find a single phone booth.
That is too bad because the phone booth represented a slice of Americana.
In the 50’s and 60’s Frat boys would compete to see how many of their fellow brothers could be stuffed in a single booth. (The World record is 25)
Young ladies going out on a date always carried a dime in case they needed to make an emergency phone call if things went awry.
Where else could a super hero change for his secret identity on a busy metropolitan street if there was not a phone booth handy.
But most of all, phone booths afforded privacy. Nowadays everyone uses a cell phone and many conversations are anything but private. Even if you have no interest in your neighbors call you are often subjected to their conversation. Cell phones are handy and serve a valuable purpose (such as phoning a friend for help finding a cache) but they can break up a tranquil moment on the trail. Worse yet you won’t have any privacy if you must answer an urgent call. I know many cachers who have gotten a call from Mother Nature and they have had to search for a little privacy to answer it. I dedicate this cache to all of those who have ever been in need of Nature’s Phone booth.
