Fayetteville pay phone has seen better days. What happened to them all?
I was driving on U.S. 301 near the Crown Complex and passed a roadside feature I had probably whizzed by many times before and never noticed — an old phone “booth.”
I say “booth” in quotes because this isn’t the kind that Clark Kent ducked into and became Superman. Those disappeared from nearly all of the American landscape a long time ago.
This was more of an outdoor phone stand, i.e. a pay phone, there at the Exxon station at U.S. 301 and Owen Drive.
These outdoor pay phones are about gone, too. Seeing one is almost like seeing a Blockbuster video store. (There is one Blockbuster left in the world by the way, in Bend, Oregon.)
Recently, I parked at the Exxon to see if I could still make a call from the pay phone, just for fun. My intent was to call my wife and talk about anything.
Up close, the phone looked scratched up, beat up and plain world-weary.
I wiped down the receiver, the buttons, and most especially the part that touches the ear — then I was ready.
I picked up the receiver and didn’t hear a ringtone. It was dead. Talk about anticlimactic.
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Loretta Nelson, who was behind the counter inside the Exxon, said she had worked there for two years and the phone had been broken the whole time.
I asked if she saw many people trying to use it.
No, she said.
About the most exciting thing that happened to the old pay phone was when someone called the store to ask about it.
“Essentially they asked to buy it,” she said. “So I just gave them my home office telephone number to call.
She recalled that she laughed at the idea.
“I said go ahead,” she invited, “and come on.”
As in, “Come on and get it.”
The booth still sits there, so presumably no deal was struck.
Coin-operated: Into the Wayback Machine
I cannot remember the last time I used an outdoor pay phone. They make less and less sense in a world gone mobile.
I hazily remember a pay phone near a convenience store on Bragg Boulevard many years ago. That was a bonafide phone booth — Clark Kent style.
I feel like it was somewhere near Cain Road, but don’t quote me. I cannot recall whether it was the last one I saw or the last one I used.
Either way: It’s long gone.
I posted pictures of the Exxon pay phone and asked folks on social media if they remembered these kinds of phones, and also if they knew of any others still standing.
I did not get a bead on a functioning pay phone, but I enjoyed people’s trips in the Wayback Machine.
“I remember when I would go on a date in the 70’s,” one woman wrote. “My dad would ask if I had change if I needed to call him.” She added a grinning emoji.
Yes, these public pay phones are coin-operated. You need actual quarters.
You cannot get more old school in a time of CashApp and umpteen other digital ways to pay.
Calling collect
Once upon a time, you could call collect from pay phones, meaning the party you call picks up the tab. There was a time when a collect call from a pay phone often meant “I’m in trouble” or “Come get me.”
But as another woman wrote: “They were essential in hotels.”
Because, she added, “to use the room phones for the local and long distance calls, the costs were outrageous.”
Other people had other memories of phones around town, most of them now gone.
“There was one a few years back downtown at the Family Dollar Store next to the ABC store. I saw this around seven to ten years ago …”
“There was one outside the Exxon station on Boone Trail and Owen Drive. Probably still there …”
Someone posted a picture of a pay phone they had taken the day prior at Dunn and Murphy roads.
That phone looked post-apocalyptic — stripped of just about everything, including a receiver.
Another man wrote in response to my social media query that he had actually used pay phones.
He added: “Vanishing America.”
A ‘stark shift’
Vanishing. You can say that again when it comes to outdoor pay phones.
“The stark shift happened fast,” says a February article posted to the website How Stuff Works. “In 1995, the number of pay phones in the U.S. peaked at 2.6 million … In less than three decades, that's dwindled to fewer than 100,000. Many still stand to this day but are no longer operational.”
The site notes that the big carriers sold their public phone operations, the last being Verizon in 2011.
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That does not mean the pay phone industry is dead, however; the site noted that there are private phones bringing in “steady business for the more than 1,000 companies that own them.”
In cities like Portland, Oregon, there are initiatives that convert old pay phones to free use for people of limited means, and in Philadelphia, a company called Philtel is actually installing new, free phones, according to How Stuff Works.
Is there still a need?
I emailed Joseph Wheeler, an advocate for the homeless who is himself homeless, about whether he knew of any working pay phones around the city — and whether people in the unhoused community still used them.
“I have seen a few pay phones,” he said, “to my knowledge, they are all broken.”
He also noted “one near Family Dollar (and) one on Person Street I believe.”
But he reiterated he did not know any that were working.
“Many of the unhoused are without phones too,” he said.
I think it would probably make more sense to give financially insecure people mobile phones, such as with the federal government's Lifeline program, rather than trying to rebuild an outdoor phone infrastructure. I would argue a mobile phone is no longer even optional in modern life.
But nostalgia certainly saved vinyl records, which not that long ago, surpassed CD sales.
So who knows? Maybe that potential buyer for the world-weary Exxon pay phone will come back yet and get it.
Myron B. Pitts can be reached at mpitts@fayobserver.com or 910-486-3559.
This article originally appeared on The Fayetteville Observer: Memory lane in Fayetteville. Pay phones live on mostly in past stories.
