color shells for WE 300 series

[Babybearjs]

awhile back I won a green 302 on ebay and the picture clearly showed a colored shell on a black 302... does anyone know the history behind these "accessories"?? when I took off the shell, I has a beautiful black phone in excelent condition.... with a little TLC, it became one of my best looking phones!     John

[bingster]

Those color-change kits show up on ebay from time to time.  The kit would have originally included not only the shell to cover the base of the phone, but also a pieces to cover the handset and handset caps, a piece to cover the dial, and a matching plastic coil that could be wound around the handset cord to cover it in colored plastic, too.

[paul-f]

Here are a few photos I've saved over the years...

I especially like the one with the built-in light.  Some I've seen have been melted over the bulb.  (Of course, clever users may have replaced the bulbs with higher wattage bulbs to get a brighter light!)

[K1WI]

  Thought I would share one of the more unusual uses of a "color phone" housing. This is on a very nice Ivory H3  mounting. I guess the subscriber wanted a red 302 and couldn't get one so converted thiers to red. The color is closer to the very late "blood red" 304 (redder than Peking Red)  as shown in last picture.

  Andy  (k1wi)
PS thanks to all for sharing your knowledege ..this is a great forum .

[Babybearjs]

WOW! so this was a regular item you could buy for the phones... ma bell must have hated mason... but the covers do make the old 300 series look nice!

[GG]

Yes, Ma Bell objected vociferously to these things, called them "foreign attachments," and waged an endless campaign against them.  Even the spiral plastic protectors for handset cords came in for Ma Bell's ire. 

A poorly made combination of parts could result in handset cradles (and now we see: even dials!) not functioning properly. 

The ones with lights on them could be potentially hazardous to telco employees: consider a loose AC power wire in that light assembly, coming into contact with a metal 302 housing where the 302 has some minor wiring error inside, and making one side of a telephone line "hot."  Then a technician working in a junction box somewhere happens to touch that terminal while also touching a ground, and gets electrocuted.  The proximity of AC mains wiring to the telephone could also multiply the potential hazard from lightning strikes.

There was another variety of phone light that consisted of a flat holder that the 302 would sit on top of, and a curved piece with a small light that was about 6" above the top of the phone: this would probably have been quite a bit safer.

Another factor would have been the hassles and extra time required by technicians who went to houses for service calls: having to fiddle-faddle and strip all those thing-a-ma-jigs from a telephone could double the time needed to replace a component.  And if the tech broke any of the decorative goodies along the way, the subscriber might call the telco and complain. 

However, as always, Bell Labs to the rescue!  By the 1960s you could have a mushroom phone in any color (except that fluorescent yellow!).  And by the 2010s you could wish that more people had done just that!

-----

Speaking from the tech side, personally I always detested those nasty shoulder rests, because they always got in the way of working on the phones, made handsets prone to falling off cradles (on modern key telephone sets with shallow cradles), made it take longer to do minor telephone set repairs, and so on.  There were other doohickies that people used to put on their phones back in the 1A2 era that also got my goat, though I can't remember the specific ones at the moment. 

Nowadays the culprits are nonstandard headsets particularly wireless ones with mechanical handset lifters, all of which festoon a phone with needless extra wires and doohickies that are liable to get out of order.   We try to be nice to clients who buy these things from God-knows-where, but inevitably there comes the bottom line of "oh, we didn't supply that item, so we can't ensure it will work as intended" and someone frowns at having just spent a chunk of dough on a device that may or may not ever be able to work as intended.

[jsowers]

If anyone has the opportunity to see the movie Susan Slept Here (1954), it has those Mason Colorphone kits all over the place. I found a B&W still of Anne Francis with one on her boudoir 302. From the expression on her face, it looks like she just found out she still has a black 302. 

The movie is in Technicolor and this looks definitely like product placement to me. It's a Christmas movie, so look for it sometime in December.

[GG]

Quoth Jsowers: "From the expression on her face, it looks like she just found out she still has a black 302."

Ha!, excellent!

(If that wasn't product placement, it might have been expedience.)

[Just4Phones]

Quoth Jsowers: "From the expression on her face, it looks like she just found out she still has a black 302."

Ha!, excellent!

(If that wasn't product placement, it might have been expedience.)

I actually have this movie on DVD.  In this shot she just found out her Oscar winning playwrite fiance is marrying or is going to marry Susan played by a very young Debbie Reynolds.  He coincidentally has a Mason colored 302 in his mid century Los Angeles apartment but as i recall when he picks up the phone you can see the black receiver caps.  This movie is in color and GREAT if you like retro.  His apartment is the epitome of  mid century "modern" complete with retro appliances.

[AE_Collector]

Nowadays the culprits are nonstandard headsets particularly wireless ones with mechanical handset lifters, all of which festoon a phone with needless extra wires and doohickies that are liable to get out of order.   

10-4. I cringe everytime I have to work on a phone with those things on it. And they just seem Soooo 1960's! Remeinds me of my "Dial a Phone" automatic dialer that actually has a dial inside it that is turned to automatically dial someone's number!

The last few weeks I have been replacing NT VOIP systems with Good Old fashioned Centrex service as some of our governemnt departments have had enough and are pulling the plug on VOIP, Hard to believe I know but had they asked me BEFORE they converted I could have saved them a lot of their (and my) money. But I digress...

I keep coming upon headsets plugged into the headset jack on the VOIP phone since the newer phone had a handset/headset switch built in. The old fashioned replacement NT 5316 digital Centrex set doesn't have a headset jack and switch and of course the customer has NO IDEA where the outboard switch box went to so they wind up with their headset lying on the desk unusable after the conversion. Nothing some more of my tax dollars can't fix though.

Terry

[GG]

Terry: VERY interesting; and please check your personal messages.  I'd love to know more about that case.

In case anyone's wondering: yes it really is up to us oldschool types to hold back the tidal wave of "race to the bottom" stuff that has been creeping into our industry.  One of the most effective things you can do to help, is demonstrate to your friends that your ancient dial phones sound better than most of the modern mobile devices and VOIP services.  Do it early and often, and keep spreading the word. 

Remember:  "Progress is a vector, not a scalar." 

[Babybearjs]

WOW, the darn things even made it into hollywood! were these out prior to the 300 series being available in color, or was it just something that was out at the same time? I remember when I got my first phone, they wanted to charge for a colored set, so I just stayed with black... at no additional charge! does anyone know if ma bell ever made the 400 series key phones in color?? so far all I have is black..black.. and more black!

[jsowers]

were these out prior to the 300 series being available in color, or was it just something that was out at the same time?

The movie dates to 1954 and was released 10-21-54, so yes the Mason kits were out well into the colored 302 era. They were even out in the colored 500 era. The introduction of color 500s and the Bell System's early efforts at merchandising and promoting color phones may have been a plus for those Mason kit things because then people could retrofit their black 302 and look snazzy. The color 302s, for whatever reason, weren't promoted much. I've seen them in other movies, though.

I agree with just4phones' description of Dick Powell's apartment. About as Hollywood Modern as it gets, complete with the white Christmas tree and 50s furniture. Funny that it would've been a perfect place to put the new color 500 sets, but it didn't happen. This movie was shot at RKO, which was on its way down the tubes. It was also shot in 3D but never released in that format, according to imdb.

[jsowers]

FYI, Susan Slept Here airs on Turner Classic Movies tonight at 1:30am eastern. It's from 1954 and  features lots of those color change kits on the phones. It also plays on Dec. 23rd at 2:15pm eastern for those who would rather sleep, like Susan.