"I Am Always Remembering..."

This photo is about a generation older than me, but I remember scenes just like this at pierside. Rotary dial payphones and summer whites. Making calls to home and loved ones... "I'm back on dry land!" The phone directory hanging on a chain... but instead dialing 411 for "Information." It really was a simpler time. We weren't connected to the world 24/7. It's a time I miss.

The phones in this photo have an accessory ringer box. It's because of where they were and how and how often they were used. Sailors just off the ship would often be making long distance call from these and you'd be putting in several dollars worth of coins to make your call. The black boxes you see under the phones contained a very loud ringer so the operator could call you back depending on how you were placing your call. 

I remember the last time I used a phone like these was sometime in 1983. It was a Saturday and it was to call home to my mother in Detroit. This generation of payphones required the operator to come on the line if you direct dialed a long distance number. After some clicks and some barely audible system generated tones, the operator would come on the line and she'd tell you how much for the first 3 minutes. She knew if you'd inserted the correct amount by listening to the sounds that the coins made as they stuck a bell in the coin path and she'd be adding up the total of the tones she heard and when you'd inserted enough, you'd hear, "Thank you <click>" and your call would be connected. When someone answered, you'd hear an electro-mechanical solenoid click to release all those coins to drop into the coin box. 

I remember you could talk for about 2 minutes more than you'd paid for before the operator would rejoin the line to tell you how much for the next 3 minutes (it was usually less than the first 3 minutes). If you hung up after going over the time you paid for, but before the operator rejoined the call to tell you to pay again, that loud ringer would immediately go off (within seconds) and if you picked up the receiver, it would be the operator telling you how much you still owed. I remember when the ship first got in there'd often be an MP standing near these banks of phone to make sure that if the operator rang back you answered and paid up!

The old style payphones these sailors are using were replaced by this next and last generation of payphones which had electronics that could count the money and signal the system to complete the call without the use of an operator. I remember that making a long distance call lost some of its mystique on one of these. 

Later in the early 90s, I got a telephone company credit card (Yes, that was a thing!) and you'd just key in your card number to pay and you'd be billed for however long you talked. You can still get an AT&T credit card, but now it's just a Mastercard or Visa card, but on the back, it still tells you how to use it to make calls! By the late 1990s you'd see fewer and fewer payphones as cellular began to be adopted. And then by the early 2000s they were mostly gone. So, if you see one now, you'd better take photo because it's days are surely numbered.

The world changes during everyone's lifetime... but it is such a strange thing to look back on those changes from the later half of your own life and realize just how much.

"I am always remembering..."