The Old Days of Phone Collecting
Published: 10/31/24
The Old Days of Phone Collecting
'By David Friedman
Originally published in 2010
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 van in Beverly Hills skidded out of control in the rain and rolled over. They parked the bashed-up van (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 van was gone. As I began my daily dumpster-diving I discovered that, before hauling away the van, 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.