Back in the old days of collecting, long before Al Gore invented the internet; it was really hard to get information on telephones. Let alone telephones! Yard sales and flea markets was it. I have been collecting over 30 years and I felt I was the only one who collected telephones. I think many of the old timers can second this. Boy was I surprised when I found the ATCA. Parts were literally nonexistent so you had to rely on Phone-Co or Gerry Billard. Good and bad experiences with both. The smarter I got with collecting telephones, the more I felt abused by these "stores." Upgraded dial were refurbs. The parts that made a phone valuable; dials, receivers, cloth cords etc were removed and replaced with reproduction parts. Yes, I learned the hard way. I made a conscious decision to never deal with these places again. If I need a part, I would just have to wait. Then the Internet, eBay, ATCA List serv, TCI List Server and finally home sweet home, the Forum. Collecting certainly changed for the better and has found a broader base than ever. For you new collectors, life is good. BUT be forewarned when dealing with the "phone stores." A little knowledge is dangerous. There is a huge difference between a #2 and a #6 dial in value and collectability on your old WE stick. Educate yourselves. I have learned the hard way. You have the perfect place; here, to educate yourselves. Ask questions and do not be trusting of the phone stores, they are in business to make money. I will now step down from my soap box....Doug
Don't fall off on your way down ;D
All great advice :)
There was one antique store that I knew in the Vancouver area selling reproduction transmitter and receiver type parts back in the 1970's. THey probably were getting the parts from Billards in Cupertino California. I bought a little bit of stuff from the antique store but didn't really like the stuff very much. As you said Doug, before Al Gore invented the internet, that was just about all there was.
Terry
Just imagine how difficult antique phone collecting must have been in the 1890s :D
Quote from: LarryInMichigan on August 25, 2010, 12:49:02 PM
Just imagine how difficult antique phone collecting must have been in the 1890s :D
Kind of like a garden hose with a funnel stuck in each end.
Quote from: LarryInMichigan on August 25, 2010, 12:49:02 PM
Just imagine how difficult antique phone collecting must have been in the 1890s :D
You had to order them by mail order from Alex Bells shops, wait for them to arrive and then distress them yourself and maybe toss a few parts into the river so you would have some restoration work to do. The bright side was that you could order the parts that you needed from the same place...
Terry
Collecting was difficult in the 1980s, that's for sure. I found a handful of phones in antique stores and thrift stores, and got burned by Billard once, too. After a while, I just couldn't find anything so I gave up on collecting phones. Even after ebay had come along, I still didn't avail myself of the telephonic treasures--phone collecting was in the past for me. Then one day a couple years ago, I stumbled on Dennis Markham's site and all it's eye candy, and it got me hooked again. I found the forum through a link on his blog, and the rest is history.
I also began collecting phones at yard sales and flea markets in the early 1980s. I couldn't find much, but I managed to outfit my first house with two black WE sets, a 554 and a Signal Corps 500, in 1984. By 1985 I had enough to install 6 rotary phones in my new house and I ran the wiring myself, borrowing the electrician's drill to drill my holes. Several of those phones are still installed and working in the same spot 25 years later.
I got a catalog or two from the stores Doug mentioned, but I balked at the prices. My interest has always been in the 500s and Princesses, and I was able to source a few parts from the local electronics store. I did part out a phone or two that couldn't be repaired and they served to fix others.
Thrift stores were great for finding rotary phones in the 1990s. I bought a few phones from eBay early on, starting in 1999. Around 2000 I bought a red 1702 with a 2702 housing on it. The seller sent it to the wrong buyer. The buyer contacted me (you could do that back then) and we exchanged phones and sent the seller the shipping bill. Something great happened from that accident. I found out that buyer who I exchanged phones with collected the same phones I did. I was like Doug, who thought he was the only one who collected telephones. It was great to have a "partner in crime" so to speak. Ever since then we've kept in touch with our phone finds and emailed pictures back and forth of our phones when they arrived. Sort of like the forum, but with only two people. We are on separate coasts--California and NC.
I also bid against Dennis Markham a lot and he bid against me several years ago. We still managed to get a lot of nice phones between us, and that was when we knew who was bidding when it was all over. I said many times after the dust settled and I didn't win, shaking my head, "that Dennis guy has great taste in phones." There were never any hard feelings. We just liked the same phones.
The old days were nice, but it's great that we now have the internet, email, eBay, phone shows and the Forum to bring all the collectors together from all over the world.
Jonathan:
I still remember Dennis talking about Yellow 500 with Yellow straight cords that went to the guy from NC. Those were the good old days (2008). But I started collecting phones in 2007. ;D ;D ;D
Great post, Doug! It is interesting to hear the stories from collectors about the early days of collecting phones. Even with membership in the phone clubs, things moved slowly when all that was available were the Ads that appeared in the monthly newsletters.
Bingster, I'm honored that my blog posts may have re-ignited your long-time interest of phone collecting. I thought I was the only one reading my posts and was always excited when someone would stumble upon my blog site. (By the way there is a web site called www.StumbleUpon.com). I do remember you making a few comments on some of my entries.
Jonathan is right about the competition on eBay. It was more fun when we could see who won an item, or who was bidding. I might have had a few choice words for him a time or two when I lost an item to him. But when I saw that he had bid on a particular phone I knew that it was a good one and that I was on the right track. It was only just over a year ago that I contacted him via eBay's messaging system to ask a question. We began to e-mail back and forth and have since exchanged many e-mails and photos of our phones. I urged him to join the Forum and since then his experience has helped many.
The Forum is yet another place to exchange information and share our interest in telephones....and other things too.
Jorge, I WAS thinking about that phone but wasn't going to mention it! :)
OK Dennis, let's keep it a secret!
Quote from: Kidphone on August 25, 2010, 11:17:10 AM
Parts were literally nonexistent so you had to rely on Phone-Co or Gerry Billard. Good and bad experiences with both.
I'll second that emotion, Doug. It was bad enough to bite the bullet & pay a high price for something you felt you needed. What really griped me were the occasions when you mailed a specific, detailed list--in the case of one of these suppliers, with their assigned inventory numbers copied directly out of their catalog-- and they sent you the wrong part. Or, even worse, the occasions I called to get a price quote, ordered the part, and discovered the price was three to five times higher than what was quoted to me over the phone! I generally didn't send things back because of their policy on the buyer paying return shipping--even if the supplier was the one who screwed up! I kept doing business with them for a little while--they were basically the "only game around" for these parts. I finally gave up using them after being charged $150.00 for used plastics to fit a WE 1500--made in 1971!!
I can't speak for the "old days" unless you count the two ancient desk sets I had in the late 1970s as a teenager. ;D
What I can say apropos this discussion is about talking with Steve Hilsz a few nights ago, to order a few WE302 parts for tinkering. It was quite a pleasure talking with a real live human being who would actually put his hands on the merchandise to sell it. Steve was as professional as anyone could possibly expect, and friendly too. :) The real pleasure was talking with someone who *knows and understands* their inventory, and appreciates talking with a customer who appreciates it, too.
Ahhhh, for the "good old days" . . .
Steve Hilsz is truly one of the good guys. Mention the Forum to him. I have tried a couple of times. His knowledge and experience would be perfect from us. Did I mention he is a great guy.....Doug
Back in the 1960s we weren't officially permitted to use any phones other than those we were forced to rent from the phone company. There were additional monthly charges for colored phones, extension phones, long cords, amplified handsets, auxiliary ringers, answering machines, automatic dialers, etc, etc. When Touch Tone service was introduced in the mid 1960s, of course there was an extra monthly charge for that too. Owning and using our own equipment was a major no-no. Anybody found with unauthorized CPE (Customer Provided Equipment) connected to the phone system had some serious explaining to do. Pacific Telephone had an entire department of Special Agents devoted to, among other gleeful tasks, catching and bringing to justice any and all CPE scofflaws. We had to disconnect the ringers on our bootleg extensions so the Test Board at the C.O. (Central Office) could not detect them, and we lived in constant fear of discovery and punishment. Bonnie and Clyde must surely have been rolling over in their respective graves with laughter. How my parents ever put up with such depravity I can only imagine! Additionally, it was really difficult to put together a serious phone collection, as there were no phone clubs or phone shows, no internet, no eBay, no phone forums, etc, etc. To an inquisitive kid interested in phones and technology it was like the Dark Ages before the Renaissance. Today, that all might sound silly and ridiculous; back then it was anything but.
In 1963 a huge and ambitious construction project, Century City, was underway just west of Beverly Hills, CA, on what had been a portion of the back lot of 20th Century Fox Studios. I would ride my bicycle down there and pester the phone guys who were installing 1A1 key systems in the recently completed 14-story Gateway West office building. One of them gave me a "spare" 565HK keyset to take home, and that really got the phone-collecting ball rolling for me. They let me look through their BSPs (Bell System Practices) while I watched them working, and I learned a whole lot in a short time. I even spent some quality time helping out by running jumper wires as the installers watched and smiled. About that same time, Sonny Alexander's flower shop, at the corner of Pico and Beverly, was gutted by a fire. I found an undamaged 16A rack stuffed with 1A1 KTUs while poking around in the rubble. Very conveniently, now I had what it took to hook up that 565. I bet ours was the only house in the neighborhood with a working key system and a dial intercom.
In 1966 Pac Tel opened the first #5 ESS (Electronic Switching System) C.O. on the West Coast in Century City. It was a multi-use facility; the C.O. was in the front, and behind it was the service garage for the phone trucks that worked in the Beverly Hills area. At the back of the long driveway, just outside the garage, was the dumpster. The phone company had very poor inventory control, and many of the installers stopped by the dumpster at the end of each workday to clean out their trucks before heading on into the garage. That dumpster became one of my favorite playgrounds. I was there almost every day and became a regular fixture around the C.O. Some of my BSPs still bear the coffee stains they acquired rattling around in that dumpster more than 40 years ago.
One winter day in about 1968, a Pac Tel phone truck in Beverly Hills skidded out of control in the rain and rolled over. They parked the bashed-up truck (still locked) next to the dumpster. It sat there for several weeks, and looking in through the windows I could see all the goodies inside that had become a jumbled pile in the crash. Then one day the truck was gone. As I began my daily dumpster-diving I discovered that, before hauling away the truck, they had emptied all the stuff from the back into the dumpster. With my heart pounding I ran and got my car, which had been parked next door in the Auto Club parking lot, and backed it up the C.O. driveway. I opened the trunk, jumped into the dumpster, and proceeded to shovel as much stuff into my car as quickly as I could, all the while praying that nobody would catch me. Phones, tools, BSPs ...I got it all! The Phone Gods were certainly smiling on me that day! The C.O. on Century Park East is still there today; however, now there is a chain-link gate across the driveway, and anybody caught trespassing back to the dumpster would quickly be in a heap of trouble. Things were a lot different back then.
Sometimes, when I think about the many things that happened when I was a kid, I can't help but wonder if it isn't all just a fantasy, and that everything I remember about my childhood is somehow nothing more than an elaborate creation of my own mind. It was, after all, a very long time ago. Yet, whenever I find myself driving through Century City and I look over at the phone company building, it feels like it happened only yesterday. And once in a while, when I am looking through my BSPs and run across one of those coffee stains, I know for sure that all the memories are real.
In college, my buddies and I lived on campus in the dorms, and we'd dumpster-dive behind the computer building. We learned more about the Multics operating system from reading those dumps and logs than any of the other Computer Science guys learned in their classes. ;D
Dave, great story and described very well. I could envision the things you were describing and enjoyed reading it very much.
I have an older brother than in his youth drove truck for a disposal service. He drove one that hauled away dumpster junk. This would have been in the early 1970's. One of his stops was at the Phone Co.....General Telephone in that area. He said he used to get out to hook up the dumpster and look inside. He remembered lots of telephones and even phone booths crammed into the dumpster. He said it all went to the landfill. Of course he was recalling these events after I had been bitten by the phone bug as he knew I'd be interested in hearing about the stuff that got away. If we'd have only known.
Gee Dave that's quite the tale!
I knew nothing really about phones back in the day, my collecting did not start until two summers ago. (though I did buy a WE 500 new in 86') I remember seeing phones in junk stores and such but never paid them much mind, alas who knows what I walked by. :P
The internet certainly has made many hobbies a lot more enjoyable for people. My son model railroads and he's part of a couple of forums, able to interact with guys with a lot of experience and they are nice and helpful for him to consult on.
Quote from: Dave F on August 26, 2010, 01:15:29 PM
Back in the 1960s, we weren't even supposed to have any phones that the phone company didn't provide. I remember how difficult it was to find any phone stuff or related information. <snip>
That brings back memories, Dave. My first foray into old phones was looking for parts to build an amateur radio phone patch. Even parts were almost nonexistent. I finally found a dial and network form a fellow at a hamfest. The parts weren't on display. When I asked, he produced them in a plain box from under the table. It felt like we were engaging in a clandestine operation.
Hi Paul,
It seems that you and I have a lot in common. For my senior year engineering project at UCLA, I built a 2-meter phone patch repeater. It was 1970, and I needed a 247B KTU to use as tone controller for the system. Locating a phone installer who could provide me with one was no easy task. Thinking about it now, obtaining touch tone phones and dials for the car wasn't so easy either. The ultimate breakup of the Bell System had many bad results, but the availability of great old W.E. equipment was not one of them!
Dave
I was in high school when I started hacking into the phone system. The dial I bought was rotary. However, a few years later when I went to college it opened up a whole new world. Students were always coming and going from apartments and usually abandoned their phones. I had quite a few rotary and touch tone sets to tinker with by sophomore year. ;D
We had one of the few 2-bedroom apartments in town with about 8 phones connected. (Only one ringer, of course!)
I wasn't really into collecting then, so only saved one of them -- the beige 2500D that was new when the phone company installed it. They got back an old rotary set at the end of the year.
Paul,
For some unknown reason that remains crazy to me to this day, Los Angeles was one of the last major cities to get touch tone service. Until the ESS office opened in Century City in 1966, it was all rotary-dial. Even after that, touch tone was only available to the Beverly Hills area for the next couple of years. One nice day, I cornered a Beverly Hills installer at a coffee shop in West L.A. and complained that I still hadn't been able to obtain a touch tone phone to play with. He bet me $7 that I could find one in the next 10 minutes. Well, that seemed like a no-lose situation, and the result was that I went home with a brand new White 1500 set - still in the box! Love that inventory control!!
Dave
It was those darned trucks they had then. Things were always "falling off" them.
Yeah, one of my friends once saw a 233 payphone fall off a phone truck on its way back to the garage. Luckily for him, it landed intact -- right in front of his house.
He bet me $7 that I could find one in the next 10 minutes. Well, that seemed like a no-lose situation, and the result was that I went home with a brand new White 1500 set - still in the box! Love that inventory control!!
Ah If we only knew then. You would be like 7 bucks hmmmmm.....I'll take 100 ;D
Do you still have it?
Joel
Quote from: Just4Phones on August 27, 2010, 07:08:49 PM
He bet me $7 that I could find one in the next 10 minutes. Well, that seemed like a no-lose situation, and the result was that I went home with a brand new White 1500 set - still in the box! Love that inventory control!!
Ah If we only knew then. You would be like 7 bucks hmmmmm.....I'll take 100 ;D
Do you still have it?
Joel
Hi Joel,
No, but I constantly wish I did. In the late 1970s, I lost interest and gave away most (but not all) of my stuff. Didn't get back into it until years later. I have never stopped kicking myself for giving away so much of the stuff I loved as a kid growing up. I do know who got that 1500. Heck, maybe one day I'll try to contact him and see if he still has it.
Dave
Earlier in this topic, way back in 2010, I made reference to Pacific Telephone's Special Agents who were involved in many aspects of the company's security, including catching people who had extra (translation: unauthorized) phones installed in their homes. Over the years, I have been asked many times by readers of my story if those people really existed, or if they were just artifacts of my over-active imagination. Well, there really were (and probably still are) such people, and here is the proof.
The first picture is the cover of a 1958 Pacific Telephone Los Angeles Area Official Telephone Directory. The second picture is of page 41 of that directory. If you were, in the old days, ever hounded by the office of the Chief Special Agent, these folks listed here were probably involved. Yup, they were real!
DF
Wow, how I enjoy reading all the fun you guys got to have back in the day. That must have been the ultimate rush, to find a dumpster full of phones and parts.
When I was in my late teens eirliy twentys, I was out riding around with a buddy, nature called so I said pull in here, I had no idea it was the local phone garage.
So after I took care of business, I started snooping, found a small wood shed far from the dumpster that had some phone parts, mostly trimline bases later I figured out the ringers didn't work, bad caps stopped them from ringing.
Then I decided to go to the dumpster, installers manuals, batteries for test equipment, even found a catalog that they used to order anything telephone related, from complete sets to parts, payphone parts, booths etc. The whole nine yards.
Well all those goodies came home with me I was elated to find any thing phone.
I liked messing around with phones for years.
When in my younger days, I was about 7, my dad while looking at property to buy, found an old house on a back road that had a 500D in black.
Well he removed it, and it sat in the garage for years.
I found it and started tinkering with it.
One day he asked me if I knew where it was, I said yea, in my room.
He said brunt it to me, I was scared thinking I was in trouble, but he wanted to use it as an extension.
Well I had pulled everything out, and just stuffed it all back in and put the housing on.
It didn't work, but my dad said can you see if you can get it working.. I said yea, I'll try.
So I used the ITT set in the upstairs hall as a model and rote down all the information I needed to maybe get that old black set working.
Sure enough, I got it working. Then I was bit by the bug.
So years later when I stumbled into the lot of the local phone garage, it rekindled my hopes and dreams of being a phone guy.
I never worked for the company, but loved phones.
I brought home any thing phone from that dumpster, even boxes. I had trimline bases, I fixed up the non working bases, used the box I found in the dumpster and then found a big box that said Western Electric on it and started putting those boxes that were now full of parts in boxes, into that big box.
I had a bunch of manuals by then, and was even getting into fixing phones for friends and their family's.
A few years after I was at a friend's apartment, who had 565s in each apartment in a huge old farm house the owner converted to apartments.
The guy who owned the place used to live in NYC, where evidently a lot of key system equipment had fallen off the trucks. The guy didn't want a lot if it, and said up over the garage is some junk, help yourself.
I'm tired of looking at it. Three huge boxes of phones all key stuff, some NOS 565HK sets in beige were in there boxed up and brand new.
So I loaded the trunk of my car and went home smiling like I had won the lottery.
That's when I got into the 1A2 stuff, I asked if he had any cable to spare, he did, even had a full spool of 100 pair in his back yard.
I couldn't move that thing it weighed a ton.
But I got about 40 feet of 25 pair.
So I went about trying to figure out what all those screw terminals were and how those phones worked.
Me sitting for hours with my VOM checking each terminal trying to figure out how it all worked.
Ahhh the old days. Such fun waiding though the dumpster for parts tools, what ever I could find.
That garage went out in the divestiture, but at the CO in town was a dumpster, where wire tools, CO circuit packs etc could be had. Then they changed from a 5 xbar, to an ESS and all the old stuff from the cross bar days was in the dumpster. Relays brand new, tools, cords test cords, you name it.
Sadly that all went away after the company's kept changing hands. And the dumpster went away and that was the end of free finds.
But the fun is still a great memory.
Yup, it was hard to get any parts at all before, in no small part because until the early 80s, phones were not for sale, and were property of the telephone company, so, no phone parts. E-Bay has made it way easier to find parts for cars as well.
Mike
I was born in 1975 and from my earliest memories, staring in about mid 1978, we had a black WE 554 on the wall in the kitchen, a black WE 500 in the living room, and another one just like it in my parents' bedroom.
One of my earliest memories was watching the repair man from the phone company work on our 554 in the kitchen; I was probably 4 years old. He had the shell off of it and it was the first time I saw the innards of a phone, and I thought it was fascinating. In hindsight, I think he was converting it to modular, because our phones were definitely modular in the '80s, but they obviously wouldn't have been when they were first installed here in the 1960s.
Another one of my earliest memories was sitting on the living room floor playing with the 500. I was banging on the hook switch and messing around with the dial. After a minute or so an operator came on the line and scolded me; told me to stop playing with the phone. I figured I'd best head on out to the kitchen to file a formal complaint with my mother; the nerve of that mean old lady on the phone! Mom wasn't sympathetic to my plight at all. She said, "Well, you shouldn't have been playing with the phone."
In 1986 my older brother convinced Mom that there was no sense in continuing to pay a monthly charge for those "old fashioned" phones when you could buy new, push-button ones for $10 to $20, so she did. I was only 11 years old, but even at that age I could discern between quality and junk. I couldn't convince them to keep the phones we'd always had, so Mom let them go back to the phone company to be replaced with some Far East Trimline knockoffs with cheesy electronic "ringers" instead. Fortunately, my aunt continued to lease her black 554 (until 1996), and since I was there frequently visiting my cousin Peter, I still got to use my favorite type of phone.
In 1988 I was with my mother when she stopped at a yard sale. There was a well-used 5302 there for $5. I didn't know what it was; I figured it was an early version of a 500. I knew it was older than the modular, clear plastic dial 500s I was familiar with, because it had a black metal dial and an F-type handset with a hardwired cord, but the shell looked pretty much like a 500's shell. I convinced Mom to buy it for me, so I got my first old phone at age 13.
It had a big 4-prong plug on the line cord and I didn't know what to do with that so I cut it off and attached the wires directly to the screw terminals (matching up the colors) behind the cover of one of the modular jacks at home. It worked fine except it never did ring. In hindsight it probably had a frequency ringer or was otherwise wired wrong for a normal private line, but I had no way of finding out how to fix it back then. I had it until I was about 20 and somehow lost it during a move, which still irritates me to this day.
In 1999 I reclaimed the house I grew up in, which had been empty for a few years, and all the Bell System-installed wiring was still here, including the modular wall mount plate with the Bell logo on the kitchen wall. I had to put a black 554 back in its rightful spot. I didn't have internet or a computer yet, so I went to the library and searched. I found a place that sold old WE phones and I wrote down their number. I went back home and called them on a Sony IT-B3 that I'd had since I lost my 5302. They said they used to be a refurbishment center for the Bell System. I told them I wanted a black Western Electric 554 with a chrome metal hookswitch, modular, with a clear plastic dial, and it had to say "Bell System Property - Not For Sale" on it. The price was around $20.
What they sent me was kind of a mongrel, but I was happy with it. It was a Northern Electric 593 with a Northern Telecom 228 modular back plate added to it. It had a 1957 soft plastic Western Electric shell, which I'm sure they added right after I called, and a Western Electric G3 handset that had been converted to modular with one of those big round modular inserts, which is another thing they probably did right after I called.
Not long after that a couple of old phones fell into my lap. First, I was working at Dexter Shoe and I saw them taking a beige WE 554 off the wall to replace it with a modern phone. I asked one of the guys what they were going to do with it and he motioned toward the trash can. I said, "Don't throw that away! I'll take it," so without any hesitation at all, he handed it to me. I kept that one in storage for a long time, because it did weird things when connected to my phone line, and I already had a 554 on the wall. Then someone online, maybe this forum, helped me rewire it for home use (it was wired for a business line or something). I eventually found an NOS WE black shell and dial bezel for it, and it's been on my kitchen wall ever since. I wasn't ruining any originality because it was an older Western Electric chassis with a Bell System Property-stamped 228A modular back plate from 1979, that had already been "refurbished" with a post-divestiture AT&T-branded shell and handset, as well as one of those horrible clear plastic hooks (which I ditched in favor of a chrome metal one in like-new condition).
Second, my older sister had bought a black modular 500 at a yard sale for her toddler daughter to play with. She had outgrown it so she gave it to me. Unfortunately she had lost the handset so I had to use that beige AT&T one that came with the Dexter Shoe phone with it for a while. But by that time I had a computer / internet access, so it didn't take me long to find a black WE G15 handset for it.
Just about the only way before was to get one from an older relative, and after 1984, get one at a thrift shop. E-Bay, even with it's faults, has been a blessing.
Mike
I remember in 1980 when I was a Apprentice Plumber we had a job site that across the road was this surplus store and at lunch time I and the boss wandered into it. There in the back on a shelf with a bunch of other junk was a WE 202 with a F-1 handset and it struck my liking. I grabbed it and took it to the counter and ask how much! The store owner said, what do you want that for? $5 and off it went home with me, sadly I don't remember what ever became of it but, that was my first vintage phone and from there when ever I found one it usually came home with me, LOL!
Quote from: jsowers on August 25, 2010, 11:08:04 PM...it's great that we now have the internet, email, eBay, phone shows and the Forum to bring all the collectors together from all over the world.
But is not nice that E-Bay tries to make it impossible to contact each other.
Mike