The last phone booth
I thought I’d found the last phone booth! But it turned out to be (at best) the next-to-the-last phone booth, because there was one just like this in the very next town.
Both phones had dial tones (if you are old enough to even know what that means), but I don’t know where the quarters went.
Danbury, Nebraska
photographed 8.31.2014
(Also, because I feel the need to be honest here on the blog, I did hang the receiver up the right way after I checked for a dial tone. It seemed like the right thing to do.)
Posted on September 12, 2014, in Photography and tagged 365 photo project, black and white photography, Danbury Nebraska, melinda green harvey, monochrome, NIK Silver Efex Pro 2, one day one image, Phone Booth, photo a day, photography. Bookmark the permalink. 17 Comments.
One Day | One Image 
It’s obviously not a New York phone because the cord is still attached at both ends.
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So, I guess that noting it was in Nebraska may have been redundant!
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It looks like a house phone in a pay phone box, not a pay phone at all. No wonder it was hard to find where the quarters (I actually remember when it was dimes) go. Maybe it was a direct line to the police commissioner, or to Nebraska’s Batman.
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George – it was regular phone with all plastic parts and everything. Maybe I was too impatient, but when I picked up the receiver, I wasn’t connected to police commissioners or Nebraska’s Batman (which is, I am pretty sure, the University of Nebraska’s head football coach). This isn’t all that far from where Brett lives, so maybe we could get him to drive over and check it out.
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The wire sticking out the back looks jury rigged as well. Are there homeless people in Danbury? Maybe this is their phone, illegally wired in.
I remember those handy shelves on the bottom too, which sometimes even had a phone book in them. Or a forgotten lunch.
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From what I saw, there aren’t ANY people in Danbury, homeless or otherwise…
No abandoned sandwiches, either.
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If not an abandoned sandwich, what IS that thing that is slipping off the shelf? Maybe it’s where drug deals go down. Shove the dope out of sight while pretending to make a call (all you need for that is something that looks like a phone). Retrieve the container while pretending to take a call. It could explain the domestic phone. If someone beats you to the container, then finding the phone not working is a perfectly understandable excuse for having a major hissy fit right there on the street.
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It looks like an empty bologna package…
…which leads me to this theory. Maybe instead of a drug-deal site, it’s part of an illicit lunch ring. At this stop, you can get lunch meat. At a similar phone booth in Lebanon, Nebraksa, you can get bread (white, of course), and so forth. It’s a complicated way to get a crummy lunch, but I guess it makes about as much sense as anything else!
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Sounds to me that an bologna package is a pretty safe place to hide dope. Who is going to open that container – the only thing worse than bologna is mouldy bologna, and that ain’t baloney.
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I know for sure I would not be interested in the contents of a bologna package, moldy or not.
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Now if you did this trip in reverse it would be the last of the two in which case it might be the last phone booth.
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I can’t imagine why I didn’t think of that! I will certainly keep it in mind for future travel to Nebraska.
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I’m guessing you have to enter a card # to make a call. Nice find!
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That’s probably right – I didn’t try to make a call, but did check for a dial tone.
It’s hard to exaggerate how happy finding this phone made me…sort of a photographer thing.
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This phone probably exists to meet the Nebraska Public Service Commission’s requirement that every telephone company in Nebraska must provide a public, outdoor phone (usually a payphone) in each community they serve. Payphone are relatively expensive to maintain, so the local phone co probably just put this there instead to meet the requirement. It probably is set up to only allow 911, 1-800 and operator-assisted (calling card, collect, etc.) calls.
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Thank you for the information; I didn’t know about the state requirements. On a related note, the last time I was there (last summer) the phone was gone, but the booth was still there…
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