Pay Phone

My first pay phone was inside a glass-and-steel, stand-alone booth in front of a gas station in a small Massachusetts town. It’s possible for an eighth-grader to fall in love, and that’s a hard thing to admit out loud, in so many words, in the kitchen of your home, where there’s only one phone on the wall. So you gathered some coins to call the girl, and you told your mother you were going to the library, but you went to the phone booth, and the light came on when you closed the door. If you were lucky, the girl would answer the phone in her house. If a parent did, you’d hang up and hope to get your dime back.

I received many letters from readers about this column on the old, broken payphone on Patapsco Avenue in Baltimore, including this one from a man named Jim Wheeler: “In the mid 1970’s I was living in Boulder, Colorado and doing my laundry at the Doozy Duds when the payphone rang. I looked around and no one was going to answer it so I picked it up. A young male voice asked to speak to a certain girl and I told him he had called a laundromat. He was immediately crestfallen as he was a sailor calling from San Diego to speak to a girl he had met on leave. He thought they had shared a real moment. We chatted for a few minutes and then hung up. This story has stayed with me as I was struck by its randomness and serendipity. Just two minutes out of 69 years and I can’t forget it.”