This is a long shot…..

[el torro]

How about being in a phone booth and the phone book had been vandalized?

Anyone remember then calling 411 and getting help from the operator in this instance?

Or how about when you were trying to make a long distance phone call & you
needed the number, so you called 1 (area code) 555-1212? (All pre-internet?)

For that matter, being on a long road trip and hoping that the next town was
big enough to have a public phone booth in the pharmacy, grocery store, gas
station, or ice cream stand?

:0)

Public phones and CB radios were what we used to communicate with when I was in high school, and when I joined the Navy right after graduation phone booths were the only way to call home. Waiting in line to use a booth sucked soooooo bad. Forget calling home from a foreign port, the connection fee for the first 5 minutes was anywhere from $25 to $40 depending on the country.

We wrote letters. On paper. And used stamps.

Any of you kids want a Werther's Original?

 

[Road Trip]

Waiting in line to use a booth sucked soooooo bad.

Wow, that brought back some forgotten memories of Basic Training at Lackland AFB &
tech school at Keesler AFB in Biloxi. I'd hate to see a pie chart of my E-1 pay vs the money
I spent calling my high school sweetheart. As you correctly pointed out, they didn't give away
long-distance phone calls back in the day. :0)

I was such a maroon, at so many levels. But that's how we used to roll back in the '70s.
:0)

 

[el torro]

Wow, that brought back some forgotten memories of Basic Training at Lackland AFB &
tech school at Keesler AFB in Biloxi. I'd hate to see a pie chart of my E-1 pay vs the money
I spent calling my high school sweetheart. As you correctly pointed out, they didn't give away
long-distance phone calls back in the day. :0)

I was such a maroon, at so many levels. But that's how we used to roll back in the '70s.
:0)

You and me both were the same kind of stupid. The high school sweetheart and I made it a little longer than 18 months before she dumped me by snail mail in the middle of my first deployment to South America. E-1 pay to phone call expense didn’t improve from the 70’s to the mid 90’s when I served.

I actually found a stack of LES papers from my last year of service a few weeks ago when I was going though old boxes of files to burn or shred. I kept all of them from when I promoted to E-5 until I got out. I made a huge gross income of $28,000 with my hazard pay and BAH for E-5.

 

[el torro]

Oh and there is still a working pay phone booth about 20 minutes from where I live. I think it was designated a state landmark recently, totally being serious about that.

***EDIT*** it’s on the national register of historic places.

News Brief: A Good Call for an Arkansas Phone Booth | National Trust for Historic Preservation

Behold, the National Register's first phone booth.

savingplaces.org

 

[Cadillacmak]

I think it was designated a state landmark recently, totally being serious about that.

That's awesome! When there was a accident back in the day, those were a beacon of hope, typically one of the first cars on the scene would race to the nearest phone booth to call for help. And in my parents day, one of the local ambulance companies would buy the front cover of that phone book holder so you would see their number right away. When the county took over those services, my parents ended up getting one of those old ambulance numbers and would get horrible emergency calls because the covers were still hanging in the booths.

 

[Erik the Awful]

Wow, that brought back some forgotten memories of Basic Training at Lackland AFB &
tech school at Keesler AFB in Biloxi. I'd hate to see a pie chart of my E-1 pay vs the money
I spent calling my high school sweetheart. As you correctly pointed out, they didn't give away
long-distance phone calls back in the day

Y'all got to make calls home? The entire time I was in basic I got to make one phone call, two minutes long.

 

[el torro]

Y'all got to make calls home? The entire time I was in basic I got to make one phone call, two minutes long.

You know I forgot about that Erik. I was able to make that first call home the night I got there. As soon as the call connected a robo voice said we had 120 seconds before disconnecting and it gave an update every 30 seconds. When it got to 5 seconds left it did a count down.

Good Ol’ Great Mistakes Navy Bootcamp. Wouldn’t trade what it made me into but I sure as hell don’t ever want to go back.

But yeah that was the only call I got to make home until a few days before Pass-in-Review, but even then we were limited to a 5 minute call twice a day, and if you didn’t know the number to 1-800-Collect you were SOL because the pay phones didn’t have coin slots.

 

[Road Trip]

Y'all got to make calls home? The entire time I was in basic I got to make one phone call, two minutes long.

Wow, these old near-forgotten memories are getting clearer with your comment. Basic at Lackland
*was* purely pen & paper, at least until we graduated & were waiting to be transported to Tech School?
(Circa '77 anyway.) But Ma Bell sure got a lot of my pay when in tech school for Avionics at Biloxi. I
spent plenty of time in the evening standing in line. (And not with my hands in my pockets lest giving
a passing NCO or officer a chance to fix a problem, if you know what I mean. :0)

Fun times. All that money fed into the telephone...and my high school sweetheart still managed to find
a shinier object than yours truly. At least all those old beater DDs remained faithful 'til rust do us part. :0)

 

[el torro]

I went through Great Lakes in late 1995. It was 105 on grinder when I got there and -35 and dropping when I flew out of O’Hare in the middle of a thunder and lightning snow storm 3 days after graduation in November for Damage Control A School at Treasure Island outside of San Francisco. When we landed the temp was 85 and humid. I was still dressed for -35 LMAO.

It was the middle of the Clinton BRAC shut down, my class was the second to last to attend school before the base was closed and the school temporarily moved to San Diego until the new academy was finished at Great Lakes. There was one bank of pay phones left operational on the island and only 8 of the 10 were working. There wasn’t usually a long wait to use one since the only people left were instructors and about 20 recruits. It was pretty relaxed, but you still didn’t dare put your hands in your pockets when you were waiting. I’ve been out 25 years and I still don’t put my hands in my pockets if I’m waiting in line for anything. LOL.

 

[Caman96]

We’ve got small 45 or idk maybe a 78 record that my father made when he got out of boot camp in WWII. It’s just a quick “Hello Ma…Hello Pa message, about 30 seconds long. They were kind of a self-serve kiosk thing I think. He mailed it off to my grandparents at the time. High tech!