Phone Fascination

I've interested in telephony since I was about 4 years old, when my brother Chuck showed me how to connect two phones together with a battery and some wires. We spent hours running wires all over the house, driving Mom crazy. Back then it was basic technology: rotary dial phones and a dry cell. Dad worked at Western Electric's Hawthorne Works, and somehow got a few old phones from collegues at the office. Chuck's phone was a classic Western Electric black 500-series with metal dial (500 C/D with 7A dial), and mine was an early colored version, red with a clear plastic dial. They made a lasting impression...

When I was in kindergarden, I brought a phone to "Show-and-Tell." Everyone wanted to know where I got it, since back then Ma Bell didn't let people own phones. The extent of my infatuation with phones became clear in first grade when we were learning to write. We had to write a few sentences on special ruled paper to practice our letters. I wrote about "My Red Handset." The teacher couldn't figure me out.

Chuck and I spent countless hours wiring old phones together to build "Chuck and Ken's Phone Company."

"Chuck and Ken's Telephone Company, Inc."

We also ran Lionel train tracks throughout the living room, dining room and kitchen, and littered the house with electronics parts -- basic drive-your-parents-nuts stuff.

By tracing wires whereever I went, I learned the basics of what Bell System telephone installers did. Eventually I wired jacks in my friends' houses. A pair of service manuals from an Illinois Bell telephone installer I met gave me lots of great information. These books were a goldmine of knowledge. Then during my college days at the University of Illinois at Chicago, I made some money by installing telephone jacks in homes and small businesses. I realized my childhood "dream" of being a telephone installer, but crawling around in old dusty attics reinforced that it wasn't something I wanted to do for the rest of my life. When I was supposed to be studying differential equations at the library at the University, I scoured the ancient issues of Bell System Technical Journal and the Bell Laboratories Record. My friends thought I was nuts. Little did I think at the time that I'd end up working in Bell Labs Research, the mecca of telephony, and publishing articles in the Bell Labs Technical Journal.

I collect old Western Electric telephones and related equipment. I'm especially interested in telephone equipment that was used in railway applications, since I also love railroading in the American West.