What made you start collecting Telephones!

[Dennis Markham]

Jorge, I will take that as a compliment.  To show your appreciation, just send me any of your soft plastic 500 sets with the matching straight handset cord! Please do a good packing job.

[McHeath]

Some fun stories here.  I can just see Bill and his buddies stringing wires along people's fences to create their own clandestine network!  Can you imagine going out in the backyard one day and nothing a wire that snakes along your fence?

My phone collecting started in 1986 with this 500.  I've mentioned it before but here is the tale again, I was in college and shopping for a phone for my desk in my dorm room.  I went to this big box retailer that was going under, they were blowing out everything at cheap prices.  In the phone department were a lot of boxes of brand new Western Electric made, AT&T branded 500s in all the colors of the day.  I seem to recall that they were not cheap at around 20 bucks each, or was it 17?

I knew that they were dinosaurs about to go extinct, and I already was fond of dated technology and such, so I bought one as a working phone and collectable item.  I picked ivory for the color as that was the color of the 500 my folks had when I was growing up and I just liked the nice soft creamy hue.

My friends in college thought I was a bit daft, "Why didn't you get a touch tone?" they wanted to know.

I've used it ever since, and it's outlived a bunch of newer phones that were supposed to replace it, cordless, cell, etc.

However, I never got another old style phone up and running until one day in June of 2008.  We'd had an old wall rotary hanging in the garage of this house that came with the house when we bought it, and it was not hooked up and I simply ignored it for years.  For some reason as I was walking by it one Saturday I stopped and took a closer look, took it down, started to piddle with it.  Looked on the Net and found out what it was, WE 352 style, and then started to try to make it work.  

It worked.  Which amazed me that something that old could work, and it was easy to work on, and cleaned up well, and before you know I was hooked.

[Dan/Panther]

I have a friend on the Radio Forum, that moved to Florida from Michigan. He knows this fellow Radio collector that won't even offer ti give him a ride to shows in Florida, he calls my Friend a Northern Carpetbagger.
True Story...
D/P

[Greg G.]

I have a friend on the Radio Forum, that moved to Florida from Michigan. He knows this fellow Radio collector that won't even offer ti give him a ride to shows in Florida, he calls my Friend a Northern Carpetbagger.
True Story...
D/P

Huh?  That I don't get that at all.  When I was in the WPB area, EVERYBODY was a "carpetbagger" from New York or New Jersey.  I was down there for 15 months and did not run into a single native Floridian.

[jsowers]

Before I collected telephones, I collected old radios since I was 12. My parents frequently went to antique shops and auction sales on the weekends and I always admired the radios and finally got one that worked when I got it home, and I was hooked. Years later when I got my license, I would go to yard sales and never found many radios, but phones were more plentiful. This was about 1977, when phones became modular and you could own your own phone.

My first decent phone find was two green modular WE sets, a 500 and a 554, from a yard sale for $5 each. Obviously they didn't go with someone's new decor because they had out-of-state area code cards on them. I snapped them up and thought I had hit the jackpot. Phones were very expensive then.

Similar to Dennis, I managed to to mess up the 554. I tried to remove the fingerwheel to put in my own number card and couldn't figure it out. The AE80 at my parents' house you just pushed the fingerwheel counter-clockwise and it came off. Well, this WE one was being stubborn and I finally got it free, but in the process broke off the metal stop where it returned, and killed the dial. After seeing inside it all, I then figured it out and haven't broken a dial since then. Later, I found another phone that donated its dial and I used the phone in my kitchen for years.

Initially I collected any and all phones to use in my house and it mushroomed from there. I spent almost every weekend haunting the thrifts in three cities nearby. When eBay came along, I started to specialize in just the Western Electric stuff, but I still have a little bit of everything in my collection. Phones are so much easier to work on than radios, and since the basic design didn't change much, it's a lot easier to find parts.

Below is one of those first two phones, the green 500DM from my living room. It now has a crack from falling in my parents' house when they used it. It still has the number card I typed out on an IBM Executive typewriter, from two area codes ago. I've used it for about 25 years now. It and all my other WE phones survived my phone line getting hit by lightning in 1995 (but the computer modem and one AT&T electronic phone didn't).

[foots]

  jsowers, was that IBM a model C? (this one is not the executive model)

[rp2813]

I've always had an interest in old mechanical stuff.  When I was a kid, my dad bootlegged a thermoplastic 302 upstairs for my sister and I to use.  It had brown cloth handset cord and the loudest clickety-clacking dial I'd ever heard.  My sister and I would beat on that dial, calling in to radio contests and forcing the return stroke back after each digit.  The fact that the old 4H dial survived is a testament to WECo's design for indestructability. 

I eventually took ownership of that phone, and through a friend who was a serious collector of everything old, I ended up with a couple more 302's, one with metal case, and a 202 with early subset.  I also picked up a 302 here and there on my own.  I harvested the oldest components from the thermoplastic 302 (like the 4H dial and original handset cord) and put them into the 202.  I used the 302's and 202's for many years as my only phones when I lived in various places. 

It wasn't until I had a more modern desk in my home office that I decided I should dust off the 10/50 500 that I had the good sense to buy at a thrift store back around 1980.   I couldn't get it to ring, I ended up finding Dennis's web site and he helped me, and then I saw him recommending this site so I checked it out.  The rest is history. 

I'm now looking forward to a GF 5302 arriving on my doorstep this week.  I never would have known about the 5302 model if not for this site.

For me, it's just difficult not to have an appreciation for the design, engineering and build quality of a Western Electric telephone.

Ralph

[Tonyrotary]

I  got into collecting phones as more of a notsalga thing. My Uncle had many rotary phones and one day I decided to get a nice white 554. A couple years later found this forum and the rest is history. I also appreciate mechanical and electrical things and these old phones are just so cool!

[jsowers]

  jsowers, was that IBM a model C? (this one is not the executive model)

No, foots, it was an older Model B Executive. I still have it in my basement and I also have a Model C in what I've seen called the smaller "escapement" (the smaller of the two proportional fonts). When I started working full time in 1985, before the widespread use of computers, I used an IBM Model D Standard in Artisan font. I have one of those at home too. Besides collecting phones and old radios, I also have an electric typewriter collection. They don't all work, unfortunately. Here is a picture of an IBM Model B Executive. It has "tacked-on" looking holders on each side for the carbon film ribbon.

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/modelb/modelb_4509PH07.html

For those not into typewriters, an IBM Executive typed in a proportional typeface where every letter took up different units of space. The backspace backed up one unit at a time, so you had to know that an "m" took up 5 units, etc. if you made corrections. The type was crisp and beautiful and you can see many booklets and things from the 1950s and 60s typed in Bold Face, which is what they called it in the later years when they made proportional ball elements. I have one of those too, an IBM Electronic 85. The most complex typewriter I have ever seen.

http://www.etypewriters.com/etron85.jpg

[JorgeAmely]

Jonathan:

Wasn't that the IBM Selectric? The one with a ball that moved at very high speed?

[foots]

  jsowers, I too have a Model C standard with small font. Its in very good condition, especially since its 48 years old, and it only cost me $5. These old IBM's are truly built like tanks. I'd love to see a picture of your Model B.

[jsowers]

Jonathan:

Wasn't that the IBM Selectric? The one with a ball that moved at very high speed?

The Selectric III used the same ball element as the Electronic models, but the Electronic models had memory, eletronic tabs and automatic carriage return. They looked like an overgrown Selectric. You could store an entire document in memory and it would retype it for you at breakneck speed. But the memory was volatile and it all went away when the power failed. I once tried to work on one of those things and it was highly complex and still very mechanical. They much improved them when they came out with the WheelWriter. The Electronics were noisy beasts. When I used mine, I put a foam pad under it to absorb the noise, which was sort of like a jackhammer.

Sorry, I didn't mean to hijack this thread and turn it into a typewriter thread.

Some of the things that lead us on to collecting phones are other mechanical devices like typewriters, radios and old appliances. Once upon a time they could be had for almost no money in thrift stores (I'm not sure if that's still the case). I kind of feel sorry for people just starting to collect phones and all they have in the thrift store are Conairs and junk like that. The repairability is something that lends itself to collecting old telephones, and sadly the newer throwaway ones were never made to be repaired.

[foots]

  It was partially my fault for the hijacking. I'm going to have to start a typewriter thread in the  "off topic" section.