Little-known museum celebrates the history and legacy of the telephone

May 11—ALBUQUERQUE — If you don't have a ringing sound running through your ears before taking a tour of the Telephone Museum of New Mexico, you might have one afterward.

This little-known love temple to telephones, located in a former AT&T administration building in downtown Albuquerque, boasts more than 1,000 telephones.

Some of them can still ring off the hook.

There's a primordial device from the period following Alexander Graham Bell's official invention of the telephone in 1876, phones from the pre-1900s, phones from the 1910s and '20s and '30s and — well, from just about every decade since up to today.

The collection includes Mickey Mouse phones, Donald Duck phones, Barbie phones and an Elvis Presley phone that sets The King to gyrating and singing "Jailhouse Rock" when it rings.

Yes, the museum is all about that device that allows us to stay connected to one another even if we lived thousands of miles away.

The nonprofit museum is run by volunteers on an annual budget of about $35,500, said Susie Turner, director of the museum.

A former telephone company employee, Turner — whose appreciation for phones comes through in her colorful, sometimes comical tour style — said there's one main reason for the museum's existence.

"I don't think we can have an appreciation of what we have and what we can have if we don't look back at what we had," she said.

"Inventing is like a relay race," she said, regarding the telephone's growth from a crank-driven wooden device with wires inside to those little handheld miracles we all stick in our pockets today. "One fellow does it just so much and then another one picks it up and makes it something different and newer and better or maybe he destroys it and starts all over."

Though the museum initially was developed in the 1950s, Turner said it did not have a permanent home until 1997. That's when it formally opened in its current locale on 4th Street near Central Avenue.

It's not the only telephone museum in the country. Some other cities, including Seattle and Lexington, Mass., have similar museums.

Despite a recent push to better promote its profile online, Turner said the Albuquerque-based museum averages fewer than 2,000 people visitors a year.

"We're a quiet little secret," she said.

Many of those who do pop in — let's say the under-20 crowd — often have no idea what they are looking at when it comes to the old rotary phones, she said.

Kids have to be taught how to dial the rotary phones — which date to the early 1900s, at least — in the museum, she said with a laugh.

She recalled one little boy saying he never heard a dial tone in his life. Turner had him pick up the receiver on one of the museum's working phones.

He still didn't know what to do with it.

"You have to put it to your ear," she recalled telling the boy.

The museum doesn't have just phones, but phone booths — including one that's Superman-themed — and switchboards from various phone company buildings from around the state. There's also an array of telephone-related parts such as glass insulators, copper wiring and paper-insulated cable.

Visual and audio displays, such as the one paying homage to Sarah "Sally" Rooke, the switchboard operator who stuck by her phone line to warn others of a wall of water descending upon the small Union County village of Folsom one August night in 1908. Her body, swept away by the flood as she made one last warning call, was found miles away.

Most everyone she called managed to survive the flood by moving to higher ground, according to the presentation.

The old switchboard operating devices on the site may summon forth memories of another Sarah, the never-seen town phone operator in the television town of Mayberry in the 1960s Andy Griffith Show.

Turner can and will run visitors through the minute details those switchboard operators attended to while connecting one caller to another.

She said by 1951 New Mexico residents could directly call each other and only needed that central switchboard operator to make long-distance calls. The central switchboard connecting system began to fade away in the 1970s and '80s, she said.

Text boxes and other displays in the museum take visitors through the history of telephone development, from Bell's time to the iPhones of today. It also details the history of the country's major telephone companies, including the Bell Telephone Company.

When the telephone first came out, people thought it was "magic," said museum board director Tom Baker, a long-retired longterm telephone company employee.

Today's phones also are seen in the same way by some people, he noted, particularly elderly users who have grown accustomed to using them.

And a lot of us use them, of course. A recent Pew Research Center report says 97% of Americans own a cell phone of some kind. That makes the old-fashioned pay-phone booth more and more obsolete, Turner said.

Many museum visitors — mostly those young'ins again — have no idea what a phone booth is, she said. She tells them it's like an "antique chat room."

In case you're wondering, according to a 2021 report from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, roughly 100,000 pay phones remained in the country at that time — down from 2 million in 1999. Most were in New York City, the report said.

Most of the materials in the museum were donated over the years, Baker said. He often gets calls from other telephone museums around the country offering to send him even more items to display. He said the museum does not have room for additional products.

It does have room for more visitors as it edges toward its 30-year anniversary, he said.

Pulling a cellphone out of his shirt pocket for a moment, the 90-year-old's eyes glistened with a hint of tears as he contemplated the long road the telephone has taken to get to where it is today.

"It amazes me that I lived through all of this and now we have this," he said, gesturing to the cell phone.

Contemplating Bell's original patent and invention, Baker smiled and said he often tries to put that date into perspective for visitors who may know little, if anything, about when the telephone system began.

"The phone was invented in 1876," he said. "The year of General [George] Custer's defeat at the Little Big Horn. Just imagine."