Old Phone Company Brochures and Magazines

[jsowers]

You're welcome. I have a couple variations on the lady sitting in the circle of phones picture that I'll hunt up and post later. One of them I use on my PC desktop at work. Evidently it was a common theme.

Can anybody provide a little more info on the button that is lifted to cut off other telephones in the house for privacy?

That's called an exclusion switch and it required a special phone with a multi-conductor mounting cord and special wiring. You could get 500s, 554s, 702s and their tone counterparts as exclusion sets. They had a special switchhook and plunger that pulled up to exclude. Once you finished the conversation, returning the handset to the cradle disconnected the exclusion and the other phones were reconnected.

[foots]

Thanks jsowers, I think my '58 WE 545 has this function. One of the plunger buttons is shaped funny and is definately different on the inside of the phone. I wasn't sure what it was for or how it was used. It doesn't help that the phone isn't hooked up either.
Oh, if anybody isn't sure what a 545 is it's a multi-line desk phone w/ a hold button, 3 line buttons, with all 4 buttons being clear, round, and are illuminated . It also has an exclusion switch too.

[jsowers]

Thanks jsowers, I think my '58 WE 545 has this function. One of the plunger buttons is shaped funny and is definately different on the inside of the phone. I wasn't sure what it was for or how it was used. It doesn't help that the phone isn't hooked up either.

Yes, keysets could also have exclusion and actually it made much more sense in an office environment.

I found my other pictures of ladies in skirts with phones and I'll post them individually. One of them was taken the same day as Jorge's picture, but it's slightly different in the way the lady's head is turned. It's from a 1955 WE brochure.

[jsowers]

This one is my favorite. It's the cover of the Mountain States Bell Annual Report for 1955. I have it on the desktop of my PC at work, but I cropped out the text at the top and bottom and left the "1955" in there. I have 500 sets and some Princesses on display in my office too. You'd be surprised how many people comment on the phone they or their grandparents had like them. One saleslady from Atlanta saw the old number cards and remembered her phone number from childhood, complete with the exchange name.

[jsowers]

This one isn't exactly in the same vein, but it does have ladies in skirts or dresses. It's the cover of the Southern Telephone News, published by Southern Bell in January, 1958. It features five ladies in dresses coordinating with the five new colors for 1958. From left they are aqua blue, white, light beige, light gray and pink. Also I've attached the description from the inside of the magazine and a picture of a lady from Paducah with yet another phone skirt.

[bingster]

I've had this one ever since it came to the house in 1982.  It was sent by the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company, the RBOC for DC, Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia.  I've just recently found it again, so I've scanned it for those of us who like old brochures.  The mailer consisted of a green envelope, inside of which was a metallic silver folder.  The folder contained individual double-sided sheets, with a different phone on each side.  The phones are from Western, Northern, ATC and others.

These are thumbnails, so click them for the larger versions:

[Adam]

Wow!  I had no idea the original retail price of the Touch-a-matic S was $299!  That makes the three I own absolute steals!  I don't think I've paid over $30 for one...

[AE_Collector]

I am a major collector of an Employee Magazine called "Telephone Talk" published by the British Columbia Telephone Company for its employees. The first issue was January 1911 and it was delivered to employees monthly until the heart of the depression when in about 1933 it changed to just quartery. After a couple more years went by it changed to bi-monthly (hope that means every other month) until the January-February 1960 issue.

At that time they changed the format from a magazine to newspaper format and renamed it the BC Tel News. The newspapers tended to get tossed out rather than filed away like the old magazines were.

I figure there were approximately 410 issues of the Telephone Talks magazines published and I now have about 330 different issues. Of course finding issues from the teens and twenties isn't easy!

Below is a picture of the cover of one of the Telephone Talk magazines from April 1912. It has the words "Souvenir" written on ithe cover because they had an open house at their new "Seymour" Exchange that covered the downtown area of Vancouver Canada and they gave these special versions of the magazine away at the open house.

Terry

[Wallphone]

Terry, You should have grabbed a few of them while you were at the Open House.
Doug Pav

[jsowers]

Bingster, thanks for posting all those scans, and in such a great format of thumbnails we can click on.

Someone was wondering on the Forum, a while back, what a Mickey Mouse phone cost new, and you have the answer right there. No wonder you saved that mailing. I would've too. Somewhere I have a few things that came in the mail in the 1980s and one day I'll find them like you found this and scan and post them too.

[GG]

JSowers gets the "laughed out loud" award for "Yes, ma'am, this is the latest in wall models. Ivory is the only color besides black. Do you have a wall anywhere we can hang it on?" in that picture of the kitchen with zero visible blank wall space. 

I don't know why that struck me as so darn funny, but it did. 

BTW, I've got a decent stack of old telco materials around, Telephony magazine backissues from the 50s - 60s, copies of stuff from ITT Electrical Communication and the Siemens and Ericsson journals, and a bunch of Ericsson propaganda from back in the days when I worked for an Ericsson-affiliated interconnect.

Now to find some photos that lend themselves to the JSowers treatment!

And the genius of JSower's captions for those pictures is, they are all 100% "square" and fully G-rated, not the faintest references to naughty themes or anything mean or nasty.   Coming up with funny-stuff without recourse to the usual "adult" themes definitely takes talent and is much appreciated. 

[jsowers]

Thanks, GG. It's nice to be appreciated, even two years after the fact.

Those 1950s kitchens were like that--zero visible wall space. Mom's has no place for a phone too. Just solid knotty pine cabinets with no "edge of the cabinet" to put a phone, then a window, and then a small space that you couldn't reach over the countertop if you wanted to. The other cabinet end was above the fridge, so that was too high. It made no difference to mom and dad since they had just the one desk phone in the den for 30 years. It adjoined the kitchen, so the phone wasn't that far.

As far as making captions to pictures, I've been doing that since high school. I wrote a report about For Whom the Bell Tolls (that's Hemingway and not anything to do with phones, BTW) with magazine pictures illustrating the characters in the back, and some of the pictures in that were kinda funny. Pilar, Anselmo and the rest.

[GG]

Jsowers: Aha!, you grew up with one of those kitchens!  That makes sense.  Today the big thing in kitchens is stainless steel everywhere, including the major appliances, which to me frankly looks like a hospital or a mortuary. 

So I suppose the equivalent would be, "Well, Ma'am, perhaps you'd prefer our panel phone in brushed aluminum?  It's very popular in hospitals, so it should blend right in with the decor."

But that's hardly as good as what you came up with.  Hmm.  Good inspiration for more efforts along those lines though. 

[Kenny C]

GG,
All of our appliances are black with brushed stainless steel I love our Kitchen.

[paul-f]

All of our appliances are black with brushed stainless steel I love our Kitchen.

Do you have one of these?