End of the line for phone booths

The phone booth standing defiantly on the shoulder of Route 23, east of Blue Ball, is a tombstone.

It's classy, glassy and spritzed by graffiti. Alas, there's no door. Or phone.

How many old booths persist in the cell phone age?

That's hard to say, acknowledges Willard R. Nichols, president of the American Public Communications Council, in Alexandria, Va.

The local mom-and-pop phone companies the APCC represents have taken over thousands of pay phones axed by national carriers in recent years.

"There are about 900 small entrepreneurs running pay phones today," Nichols said.

Overall, though, according to the Federal Communications Commission, the phones' numbers are dwindling.

About 630,000 pay phones remain on duty nationally, down from 2.6 million in 1998, according to Nichols. Pennsylvania still has about 30,000.

Many of the surviving phones are simple boxes or podlike affairs, affixed to the walls of stores, hotels and truck stops or arranged in arrays at airports and bus stations.

Nearly extinct is the kind of full-length cabinet used as a secret elevator by 1960s TV spy Maxwell Smart.

But don't write the epitaph of the pay phone yet.

College students might not cram into them anymore. Superman goes elsewhere to change into his cape.

But people still use pay phones to place more than a billion calls a year, according to Nichols. "Clearly, the phones remain a lifeline for the disadvantaged." They can be a godsend for travelers and a mainstay in some rural areas.

Or a backup for anyone facing a major disaster, such as Sept. 11 or Katrina.

Nichols related the story of an elderly Ponchartrain Hotel guest in New Orleans, where the 2005 hurricane ravaged cell phone reception.

While walking through the hotel lobby, he said, the woman picked up a pay phone handset on a whim. "It had a dial tone; she called Sweden and told them she was all right."

Ringing off?
Pay phones, and their housings, have a colorful history.

Early booths were painstakingly fashioned from mahogany and other precious woods.

The first outdoor Bell System coin phone was installed on a street in Cincinnatti, Ohio, in 1905, according to AT&T's Web site. Some of the new glass-and-aluminum booths designed by Bell Laboratories in the 1950s were bashed in by aggressive Alaskan moose, who glimpsed their reflections in the windows.

Phone booths eventually became targets for vandals. Wireless networks started bringing pay phones down in the 1990s.

AT&T announced its exit from the business in 2007.

Coin phones no longer generated enough money to cover their upkeep, AT&T spokesman Adam Cormier said.

The company, which had about a million public phones nationwide two years ago, removed some and sold others to independents.

Verizon maintained about 220,000 pay phones in 2007 and now operates about 180,000, according to spokesman Lee Gierczynski.

Verizon remains the primary exchange company in Pennsylvania.

"We believe pay phones still provide a valuable service for customers," Gierczynski said. A Verizon phone must handle about 150 calls a month to be profitable.

"We don't know who uses the pay phones," Gierczynski added.

Valerie Gregory used to.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Gregory lived in an apartment just up Route 897 from the outdoor phone booth in Fivepointville. She'd walk across the road any time she wanted to telephone, she recalled.

That wasn't terribly unusual back then. Now, said Gregory, who serves as secretary/treasurer in the nearby Terre Hill Borough office, "I do have a cell phone."

The historic booth is still there, outside Joe's Auto Repair, though it's not in peak shape.

One of the windows has been smashed; blunt glass crumbs litter the shelf securing "The Official 2001-2002 Frontier Community Directory." Traffic hisses by a few feet away.

A couple of quarters clinked straight through to the retrieval slot last week. "Your call did not go through," confirmed the recording on the other end of the line. More responsive was the pay phone attached, between two hitching posts, to the cinder block wall of nearby Weaver's Store Inc.

There, 50 cents bought an unlimited-time hookup to the world of satellite signals and cell phone exchanges. A few feet away, a horse tethered to a buckboard wagon stamped its hoofs and snorted steam into the cold air.

An Old Order Amish woman inside the store said she was unsure whether many church members use the phone.

It's a far cry from the days when big carriers competed for hot pay phone sites.

"None of [the phones] are especially lucrative [in] this day and age," Nichols said.

In an effort to tip the balance a bit, the APCC has sued Sprint and other long-distance carriers to recover federally mandated compensation for coinless calls made from pay phones.

Despite the trends, Nichols added, small-scale pay phone operators are likely to be around awhile longer.

Mom-and-pops have lower overhead and can afford to maintain any phone that sees 100 calls a month, Nichols said. And people keep plugging in those quarters. Including security-conscious people, like Nichols.

His friends point out that he has a cell phone. He does, he admits, but he doesn't use it for his most important contacts from the road.

"I tell you, if I'm calling in on a conference call to one of my board committee meetings, for example, I call from a pay phone."