What Made You Start Collecting Telephones?

[mlast77]

My grandfather was a lineman and telephone repair man for Mountain Bell, and I recall seeing boxes of old phones when I was a kid (that I now know were 302's he had pulled out of rural Idaho homes when replacing them 500's, I assume). I had toyed around with connecting Analog phones to VoIP and cellular systems, so I kind of kept an eye open for the 500s I grew up with to use as sort of an intercom around the house.

Then, at a flea market, I found an AE40 Monophone with a button built into the handset. I was super intrigued, and for the first time, opened a phone and explored the design. A while later, I saw Kellogg Masterphone 1000 ... I didn't get it, but I couldn't stop thinking about it.

I love all the info everyone shares on here, and I'm having fun and learning a lot! Thanks!

[MMikeJBenN27]

What made me start is seeing on E-Bay the phones of my youth - 300 series phones and soft-plastic 500s, the Space Savers, and even the A1 - B1 - D1 cradle phones.  I used to see all of those as a kid, but later on hardly ever saw any, eventually there was nothing but modular, then just Touch Tone, so I started grabbing them.  The rest is history.  I recently got a blue 304 and an orange 554 with BLACK, rather than white, letters and numbers on the dial face.

Mike

[ChrisW6ATV]

What made me start collecting telephones? Hmm, this should be easy:

-They have wires in them.
-There are "old" ones.
-More than one will fit into my home.
-Some of them can be bought for less than $1000 each.

That list alone makes me want to collect them (and so many other things too, haha), but there are more details.

I got interested in electronics when I was a teenager, so I went to Radio Shacks all the time. At some point (1977 maybe?), they were selling "refurbished" or just "used" telephones of all kinds for US$5 each. I bought what I now know was an AE 90 black wall phone, and my older brother bought what I think was/is a WE 302. We either found old 42A-type blocks in our rooms or ran our own wires from other blocks, and now we had phones in our rooms in addition to the beige (or similar) 554 on the kitchen wall in our apartment. Around this time, I also bought a white WE 1554 and tried it without success; a friend later got it rewired properly and it worked too.

Everything else is just following the four steps above, more or less.    I love cool old stuff!

One more detail: My love of old phones and equipment was highly amplified by getting a job with a major university near me, in their telephone department. (They essentially run "their own phone company", with thousands of lines/phones between the university and its associated adult and children's hospitals and clinics throughout this area.) I worked there for over seven years until I retired in 2023. That was a truly awesome job, including my bosses and co-workers.

[Connu]

I've worked in the yellow page industry, and what's left of it, since the late 1990's when I started a company called InformationPages.com.  Our mission, via our yellow pages software platform, was to help the industry transition print from in-house to full online production, and at the same time move to mobile apps and websites.  We won numerous Association of Directory Publishers (ADP) awards and later purchased and merged with a software company called Yellow Magic.  Although our US clients never very successful on making the transition from print to digital, many of our foreign accounts were.  You can see examples of our work at https://yellow.com.mt (Malta Yellow Pages) and across the Caribbean at https://findyello.com (Global Yellow Pages).

I started collecting by accident just in the last year.  I inherited a beat-up phone booth from my father-in-law that had always been in his basement.  My wife grew up with it and many friends, family, and acquaintances had signed and scribbled graffiti in the booth with a marker that was always left lying under the phone.  When Dave and his wife downsized, I rediscovered the booth and decided to restore it the best I could.  It came out great.  I was blown away by the craftsmanship of the solid mahogany doors and veneered sides, beveled glass, and especially the heavy-duty hardware which included the original blown glass mercury switch to turn the light on and off with the door opening and closing.  It came out so well that I decided to look for a phone that might have been installed in the booth in the 1940's and 1950's.  I ended up going with a very nice (read expensive) Automatic Electric Company (Since I mostly worked with the independents and GTE) 62 series 3-slot.

Sorry for the wordiness.  In short, I'm hooked on these wonderful and beautiful machines.  Just yesterday, after joining the forum, I stumbled upon and purchased an inexpensive project phone.  The thrill of finding out it was a virtually untouched AE 66-E-10 with both keys and an original 2a coin box was almost as exciting as winning the lottery!  I hope to learn as much as I can.  This forum seems to be filled with the only enthusiasts I've come across that are willing to part with their precious knowledge simply because of their love and fascination of these awesome old phones.

Now, does anybody have an AE porcelain daisy and dial they'd like to part with?