Time Capsule #3: the pay phone

The two phones in New Hamp were the wooden booth phone just inside the dorm's front door and the wall-mount phone on the 3rd floor landing. They were far from user-friendly.

Outgoing calls, which were mostly long-distance requests for funds or aspirational negotiations with possible dates, required a lot of quarters. Parents might accept a collect call, but it was bad form to ask girls at Skidmore to pay for cold calls.

Then there were the privacy issues on the third floor where the phone was in the middle of a well-used hallway. Rowdy classmates (apologies for the redundancy: it was New Hamp) staggered by making lewd noises as you were saying, "I love you, too, baby." You had to talk over loud laughter as you earnestly pleaded with a professor for an extension on an over-procrastinated paper.

On March 7, 1970, the day of the eclipse Carly Simon sang about in "You're So Vain," I took a pocketful of quarters to the third floor phone in New Hamp and called George Lund in Tacoma to ask for his daughter's hand in marriage. (He said yes, I think with a sigh of relief almost as deep as mine.)

Incoming calls were tricky because there were two phone numbers for over a hundred residents. A call from the faculty of the Dept. of Romance Languages summoning me tout de suite to Dartmouth Hall to respond to charges that I'd cheated on the Spanish placement exam during Freshman Week went through a dozen messengers before it finally found me in Room 103.

I've heard stories from the criminal element of the class about techniques for tricking the phones into giving you more minutes than you'd actually paid for. I'd repeat them, but --no surprise!-- I've forgotten how they did it.

Ancient history, a long-gone technology.

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