Paging Amelia Earhart…

Calling Up Phone Booth Memories

The phone booth at the Karnes County Smoke House (long since closed) matched the color scheme of the roadside South Texas eatery.

Like most Baby Boomers, I became aware of phone booths long before I ever heard the clink of a falling dime followed by a dial tone.

That’s because I devotedly watched the black-and-white Superman television series in the early to mid-1950s and knew that mild-mannered Daily Planet reporter Clark Kent often used phone booths to peel off his gray, double-breasted suit so he could rush off to fight for truth, justice and the American way in his Superman attire. Apparently, no bum checking phone booths for accidentally left-behind change ever stole Superman’s civvies while the Man of Steel busied himself bouncing bullets off his chest or leaping tall buildings.

Even Superman couldn’t always find a phone booth when he needed one.

My first significant connection with a phone booth was borne of puppy love. Shortly after I started in the ninth grade, I made a major step in my transformation from young boy to teenager in a phone booth outside a 7-11 store only a few blocks from my home in North Austin. There, I finally summoned enough nerve to call the girl I had a crush on and ask her out on a date. She said yes, never knowing I hadn’t been man enough to call from home for fear that my mother might possibly hear my faltering, “If you don’t have plans for Friday night would you…”

Later, when it became cool to see how many of your high school friends could get inside a phone booth, I vaguely remember a laughter-filled effort in that regard. The details are fuzzy, which may have something to do with the illegally obtained beverages we had been consuming when stuffing a phone booth suddenly seemed like a brilliant idea.

Phone booth stuffing became a thing in the 1950s and continued into the following decade.

In the 1960s, when all expenses connected to a date could be handled inside a $5 bill, teenage girls were encouraged by their parents to keep a dime in their purse or shoe in case they ever needed to call for a ride home. You could dial “O” and place a collect long-distance call, but if you didn’t have a dime, you weren’t going to make a local call. Lacking a dime in time of need could be a problem at any level.

The late long-time Longview businessman Tommie Daniels liked to tell a story about famed East Texas newspaper publisher Carl L. Estes and President Lyndon B. Johnson. According to Daniels, Johnson had flown to Gregg County for some function at the Lonestar Steel plant. Afterward, at the airport, he remembered he had not checked in with Estes, a longtime supporter.

Unfortunately, the President didn’t happen to have a dime on him. Demanding a coin from an aide, Johnson stepped into a phone booth and called Estes.

“What time is it?” Estes reportedly growled when Johnson identified himself.

Hearing it was about midnight, Estes yelled, “Call me in the morning” and slammed down the receiver on the most powerful man in the free world. Except, apparently, in Longview.

My relationship with phone booths hit its stride in 1967 when I, too, became a mild-mannered reporter. I didn’t have enough experience yet to work for a large paper like the fictional Daily Planet, but the San Angelo Standard-Times took a chance and gave me a summer job. That fall they offered to keep me on if I wanted, the beginning of a full-time journalism career that lasted nearly two decades.

Back then the Standard-Times was the newspaper of record for a chunk of West Texas roughly the same size as Ohio. Its reporters thoroughly covered the news from Sierra Blanca on the west to Lake Buchanan on the east, Post to the north and Del Rio to the south. The only means of filing what is now known as a breaking news story from one of those far-flung locales was to call the newspaper collect from a phone booth and dictate a story. During hot weather, a phone booth offered nothing more than shade, but in winter, calling in a story from the narrow glass rectangle at least got me out of the cold wind.

Comfortable as they could be in adverse weather, phone booths appealed to some passersby as porta potties.

Phone booths existed indoors as well. All hotels had at least one phone booth in their lobbies, with the big-city hostelries usually having a bank of booths. These, incidentally, were wooden, though the doors had glass. In Austin, the Capitol had numerous phone booths to facilitate communication between lawmakers and their primary constituents—the lobbyists.

Far from the echo-filled halls of the Capitol, a phone booth in a South Texas restaurant played an important part in my journalistic career. Fellow reporter Larry BeSaw and I were on our way back from Corpus Christi, where we had found the paper equivalent of a “smoking gun” proving that Austin’s mayor pro tem had violated the city charter by doing public relations work for, ironically enough, Southwestern Bell Telephone Co. (At the time, Texas’s larger municipalities had rate-making authority over public utilities, so the council member’s dealings with Bell constituted an obvious conflict of interest.)

As Larry drove, with a portable typewriter balanced on my lap, I pounded the keys as we drafted our joint-byline expose. We stopped at Barth’s Restaurant in Kennedy for supper and to file our story. From a wooden phone booth inside the venerable eatery that was old-fashioned even then, I dictated our piece to someone on the city desk at the Austin American-Statesman. The day after our article ran on page one, the mayor pro tem resigned. Later, BeSaw and I won the 1975 Headliner’s Club “News Team of the Year” award for that article—and others—shedding light on Bell’s shady dealings in Texas.

In the pre-cable, pre-internet days, news kept more regular hours. The 24-hour news cycle was yet to be. Anything that happened after midnight fueled the content of afternoon newspapers, while events taking place after noon were fodder for the morning newspapers. When the last edition of either had been put to bed, many reporters and editors headed to their favorite bar.

In Austin, for years reporters tended to hang out at Scholtz Garten, an institution that has been doing business in the Capital City since 1866. Politicians and other newsmakers also favored Scholtz’s, so sitting around drinking beer also had an element of work to it.

For the convenience of both camps, Scholtz’s had a wooden phone booth outside near the back entrance. That phone booth allowed for the various types of discrete conversations only the overabundance of alcohol can foster, from apologetic phone calls to the wife for being late to news tips or sometimes even stories phoned in to the city desk.

The Scholtz’s phone booth also facilitated a favorite pastime—generating phony telephone pages. The bar had a PA system, and in the time before beepers, much less all the other forms of instant communication now available, the management of Scholtz’s obligingly used their sound system to notify a patron that they had a phone message.

One night, having sampled several pitchers of beer, someone in our group – it might have been me – went to the phone booth, called Scholtz’s and asked the bartender who answered to please page Amelia Earhart. The bartender, evidently not well-versed in 20^th century aviation history, cheerfully did as requested.

“Amelia Earhart…Amelia Earhart…you have a call.”

Those who did know that Ms. Earhart was no longer taking calls laughed heartily, but the bartender didn’t snap to our joke. Jimmy Hoffa, Judge Crater and other long-absent notables also failed to answer pages based on calls from that wooden phone booth.

Long since made obsolete by the now-ubiquitous cell phone, surviving booths have become expensive collector’s items. While technology has made communication as easy as it was for Captain Kirk and his crew in the original “Star Trek,” good luck finding a place to have a private conversation in a public setting—or to change into your Superman costume.