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Welcome
to my website featuring my
telephone collection (or should I say
obsession?). Being of the
“Baby Boomer” generation, I guess its only
natural to collect items in the present day that you would have thrown
away as a much younger person. Doesn’t it make perfect
sense to pay
ridiculous prices in today’s market
for items that thirty
or forty
years ago I could have had for practically nothing? In
my
early years I had little desire for collecting anything, let
alone
something as odd as old telephones.
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One of
my favorite telephone artifacts is pictured here. |
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I had no clue, that this was the beginning
of
a sizable collection, and countless hours of beating
the brush for great finds. After
holding the obligatory high school
jobs gas station jockey, stock
boy and such—I managed to land a job at the Lincoln Telephone &
Telegraph Company (LT & T).
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In the
late 60s I worked as a warehouseman for LT & T. One of my jobs (now
remember, I was a 19-year-old who could have cared less about old
stuff) was to travel the back roads of southeastern Nebraska and
retrieve obsolete materials from the small towns served by the company.
We would take a flatbed semi with sideboards on the trailer, and pick
up wooden box phones, fifty-five gallon barrels of candlestick phones
and early cradle phones, and return them to Lincoln, where we would
take them to the local landfill and watch them burn, and then be
buried. I have no idea how many telephones I watched destroyed, but the
count was certainly in the hundreds and maybe in the thousands. It
almost turns my stomach to think of all those phones, and to think of
what I pay for phones like those today.Being a teenager in the Vietnam
era of the late 60s meant that sooner or later
Uncle Sam was going to change my life. As the draft lottery pulled my
number (37) I decided it would be better to enlist than be drafted.
Since I was working for a Telco before joining the service, the Navy
thought I would make a good “Spook,” and I spent most of my time in the
Philippine Islands intercepting transmissions from north Indo-China.
Three years, three months, and twenty-seven days later, Uncle Sam’s
Navy and
I parted ways. Upon returning from the service, I returned to the local
Telco, not knowing at that time, it would be a thirty-five year
career.In
looking back on my Telco career, I held such jobs as cable TV installer
and troubleshooter, groundman, warehouseman, telephone installer,
switchman, outside plant engineering and distribution center
supervisor. Almost sounds like I couldn’t keep a job doesn’t it?
Because of my involvement with the telephone company, I joined a great organization known as the Independent Telephone Pioneers of America. Our local chapter of the pioneers is a philanthropic organization that’s charter is to work with the sight and hearing impaired citizens of our community. By joining the pioneers, it also allowed me to become a member, and eventually lead the historical committee for the preservation of an antique telephone collection, which had been started in 1928. This collection was housed in the Telco’s main building to which the public had very limited access. Almost immediately after becoming head of the historical committee, I and a very dedicated group of volunteers, set out to move this collection to a place where the public would be able to appreciate it. About this time the Telco decided to remodel the area where the collection resided, and the collection was displaced. Through numerous conversations with the executive staff of the Telco, and the dedicated work of many volunteers, we were given the use of an abandoned Telco building to serve as a museum where the public could view the collection. Through a very generous donation from the Independent Telephone Pioneers Association, and nearly 3,000 hours of volunteer work, the Frank H. Woods Telephone Pioneer Museum was born. Now that I am retired, the museum is one of my main volunteer projects, and I currently hold the office of president of the Board of Directors. If you would like to cyber tour our museum, please go to the home page and click on the museum link at the bottom of the page, or go to www.woodstelephonepioneers.org. You will also find on the home page links to two national antique telephone collector clubs. As you
can see from the pictures on this
site, I have also given birth
to my own museum of sorts—a museum that
my wife calls “the living room.” I have been
married for more
than
thirty years to a partner who, when I hung my first antique telephone
on the wall, just looked at me and didn’t say much. When the second one
appeared, she asked, “Am I seeing a pattern here?” My wife has allowed
me to indulge my telephone obsession, and her support
has allowed me to
develop the collection I have today. How many significant others would
allow their spouses to hang
over fifty wooden wall phones, and more
than sixty-five
candlestick phones on the walls of their home?
I once reconstructed a wooden telephone booth in our living room, to a rather cool reception I might add. Several years later I acquired a much older booth (one that I had been pursuing for 25 years). I sold the first booth, and when the new owner came to pick it up, my wife seemed miffed. I had not told my wife that I had another booth, and after the new owner of my first booth left, we had one of those discussions. You know the one where you know its better to just nod than explain why you just sold something that she had become fond of. After letting her stew for several days, I put the new (but much older) booth together and placed it where the other one had been. When she returned home, all was forgiven (until she found out that I had been letting her stew for days knowing that I had a replacement out in the garage). Some things are best just left alone. Our two children--both graduated from college and living in other states--told friends as they were growing up, “Dad just does stuff like that,” referring to the phones on the wall. Now that they are older and they return home for visits, they spend time picking out which old phones they want to inherit. My wife continually brings up the fact that she has no clue as to the value of the collection, and that I need to document what I have. It’s yet another project for future consideration, and a partial reason for this website. I would like to acknowledge two individuals who, without their involvement, this website would not exist. Mr. Gary Goff and Mr. Henry Crane were of great technical support for this website's development, and I am greatly indebted to them. If you have old telephone equipment for appraisal or for sale, please drop me an e-mail, as I am always looking to add to my collection or to our Pioneer Museum’s collection. Items I am looking for include, but are not limited to:
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Please e-mail me if you have such items at: dt44829@alltel.net
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