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David Mitchell

I know. I know. It wasn't all that interesting.

I was mainly trying to share the funny story about the "unidentified aircraft" approaching at high speed from "the North". I'm sorry I couldn't recall the details of the conversation better.

I hope you will find more interesting stuff in the next few excerpts.

Michael McLeod

Dave: I dig your stories. keep 'em comin'

I'll pitch in:

Been going back over old stories,as old fart writers tend to do, plus my sweetheart has ordered me to pull together a collection for my kids.

thought this quirky little nostalgic piece I wrote quite a while back might be of interest.

I wrote so many stories I have forgotten researching and writing most of them. speaking of forgetting. this one i do vaguely recall. I had fun writing it and was grateful to whoever came up with the assignment. I also like the headline they put on it. Sometimes headlines were developed by individual editors; sometimes we'd look at a story and bang ideas back and forth to come up with a catchy headline, 

Anyway: can you believe we used to be able to make phone calls for a dime? I had forgotten. 

 LAST CALL FOR THE PAY PHONE

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By Michael Mcleod Orlando Sentinel

UPDATED: October 25, 2018 at 4:10 PM EDT

Clyde Lee didn’t have an office, and Lord knows, he couldn’t work at home.

Lee was a bookie, running a numbers game that prospered as an open secret in pre-Lotto Orlando. His headquarters was a phone booth outside an Enco gas station at Interstate 4 and State Road 434 in Longwood.

The location worked out fine for him until midconversation on a balmy June day in 1971, when Lee looked out the glass-paneled booth at the sight of a gunman pumping seven .45-caliber slugs straight at him.

We are gathered today to pay tribute to a departed friend. Not Clyde Lee. He’s fine. Doctors saved him, and the state attorney put away his underworld boss, notorious “Cracker Mafia” kingpin Harlan Blackburn, for ordering the gangland hit.

It is the pay telephone we have come here to commemorate. It’s not dead yet, but you can hear the bell tolling.

Once, every pay phone had its own little booth, and every little booth was a stage for solitary dramas. Telephone booths were the original chat rooms, back in a time when real life was all that there was.

Underworld characters slinked into the booths to smoke Lucky Strikes and rat on one another. Reporters in dapper hats phoned in scoops from them. Lovers held their receivers close to murmur across the wires.

Phone booths held the crowd at bay, providing a sliver of privacy for one thin dime. It was the greatest time-share bargain in history.

Naturally, it didn’t last.

BORN OF NECESSITY

Phone booths all but disappeared 30 years ago, and pay phones have declined from 2.6 million in 1996 to less than 2 million today. The pay phones are disappearing like dinosaurs mainly because cell phones are multiplying like a retrovirus.

More than half of all adult Americans are bipedal phone booths. It is the perfect device for a world in which everybody knows everybody else’s business, whether they want to or not.

In 1993, there were 13 million cell phones in the United States. Today there are 143 million. William Gray certainly could have used one.

Gray needed to find a phone to call a doctor for his ailing wife. This was not an easy thing to do in 1888. The telephone was only 12 years old, still exotic enough that Mark Twain was wondering how people could be expected to have an intelligent conversation over long distances: In his experience, they had a hard enough time doing it in person.

Public phones were available in a few hotels and banks, where they were watched by attendants who collected payment when patrons finished their calls. But the elegant, carpeted wooden booths were few and far between.

Gray eventually tracked down a phone in a factory near his home in Hartford, Conn., and coaxed the foreman into allowing him to use it to summon the doctor. But the experience made him wonder if there wasn’t a market for a coin-operated public telephone. He collaborated with another inventor and installed the first attendant-free public phone in a Hartford bank in 1889.

It caught on fast. By 1902, there were 81,000 pay telephones in the United States, most of them stationed inside restaurants, grocery stores and hotels. For the next four decade,s they served as a community magnet in neighborhoods and small towns. Not until 1946 did more than half of American homes have telephones in them.

Up until then, says Sheldon Hochheiser, corporate historian for AT&T;, “The pay telephone down at the grocery store was an important part of the neighborhood, a focal point of the community.”

In larger cities, the pay telephone was a haven for traveling salesmen. Famed New Yorker writer A.J. Liebling watched hordes of fly-by-night entrepreneurs working the long banks of phone booths in Manhattan’s hotel lobbies and called them “Telephone Booth Indians.”

“In their lives,” Liebling wrote, “the telephone booth furnishes sustenance as well as shelter, as the buffalo did for the Arapahoe and Sioux.”

AN ICON IN THE MAKING

Pay telephones eventually became so deeply ingrained in American life that even the government catered to them: When the U.S. Treasury changed the composition of coins, they checked with the telephone company to make sure the coins were compatible with pay phones.

Outdoor booths began appearing on military bases during World War II and became prevalent in the ’50s. Soon the booths were attracting the attention of college students and the occasional moose.

The college students made a loony competition of cramming as many kids into the booths as possible: The North American record, set at St. Mary’s College in Morega, Calif., was 22.

The moose came calling soon after phone booths were installed in national parks: Several of the animals charged into the booths and destroyed them, having mistaken their reflections in the glass for a rival horning in on their area code.

Cheaters abused pay phones in a different way, using everything from bells to whistles to make free calls.

The first generation of telephones was monitored by operators who had to listen, over the wires, for the sounds coins would make as patrons slipped them into the slots. One bell, with a deeper pitch, was beneath the quarter slot; another, higher-pitched bell would register nickels and dimes.

Deceptive callers tricked the system by using coins on strings to fish for free calls. The telephone company came up with a new design, featuring a small blade that cut the string.

In later years, thieves learned to peel away the plastic phone cord and rub the bundled wires inside together, creating a short-circuit and a free connection. The phone company wrapped the cord in metal armor.

Then came the flakiest pay-phone scam of all.

In 1972, John Draper, a bearded, gangly student at the University of California’s Berkeley campus, discovered that a toy whistle included as a promotion in Cap’n Crunch cereal could be used to trick the telephone system into allowing free long-distance calls. The whistle, by chance, was the same pitch as the electronic tones that steered calls into open trunk lines. All Draper had to do to make free long-distance calls was to pucker up and blow.

Eventually the phone company changed its internal trunking mechanism, and the police caught up to Draper, who forever after had the nickname “Cap’n Crunch” and the distinction of being one of the world’s charter hackers.

GETTING INTO THE ACT

Phone Booth, the current film starring Colin Farrell as an unprincipled media consultant trapped in a New York City phone booth by a sniper, is just the latest movie to use the phone booth as a prop.

In the ’30s and ’40s, countless celluloid gangsters made the mistake of calling from phone booths. This was generally a cue for the gangsters to be Tommy-gunned by drive-by colleagues, all of whom were much better shots than whoever tried to gun down Clyde Lee.

A phone booth provided a bit more protection for Tippi Hedren in 1963, when she ducked inside one to find refuge from murderous crows in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.

In comics, a phone booth provided a place for Clark Kent to change into Superman.

In the theater, a phone booth was a key part of the set in Sweet Charity.

A single, old-fashioned seaside booth became a nostalgic symbol in Local Hero, a small-budget 1981 movie about a harried American businessman who escapes the jangle of office phones and finds nirvana in a magical Scottish town.

In real life, phone booths had begun to disappear. Vandals had made the booths hard to maintain, so they were replaced by an abbreviated, less vulnerable, eye-level metal box.

Soon, even those were in danger — not from vandalism, but from something industry insiders feared even more: deregulation.

In 1984 the FCC issued the first of several rulings that would break up the Bell telephone monopoly. Soon hundreds of competitors flooded into the pay-phone business. Maintenance and service fragmented. The emergence of the cell phone made it even harder to justify the upkeep of a pay phone, particularly in a remote location. In 1996, the average pay phone registered 700 calls a month. Today it’s half that.

“The bottom line is that most conventional pay phones are not bringing in enough cash each month to cover the cost of the phone line,” says David Massey, an Atlanta Bell South technician who operates a Web site tribute to telephone history at TelephoneTribute .com.

Not too long ago, on an isolated stretch of North Carolina road that rendered his cell phone useless, Massey and his wife searched for miles to find a pay phone. “We finally found two pay phones next to each other, owned by some generic company we never heard of. One didn’t work at all, and the other had such a bad connection we couldn’t understand the other person.”

Bell South is getting out of the pay-phone business. The company plans to unload its 143,000 pay phones by the end of the year.

Pay phones are likely to remain available indefinitely in shops, hotels and airports. But they will share many of those locations with the latest high-tech challenger: Wi-fi, a wireless system that allows laptop users to check in via e-mail rather than phoning home.

Industry analysts predict that by 2007, wi-fi will generate $1.63 billion in revenue.

Wi-fi consists of “hot” zones in hotels, coffee shops and airports. Inside the zones — one of which will be in place at Orlando International Airport early next year — laptop users can access a wireless link that allows them to log onto the Internet for a small hourly fee or about $10 a day.

The “hot” zones are the ultimate in electronic downsizing: They’re practically invisible. You could walk right through one without even noticing it.

THE LAST OF A BREED

Now and then, a survivor of the ’70s phone-booth purge pops up on the urban landscape.

There are two British-style phone booths on Orlando’s Church Street — relics of the antique motif of Church Street Station — but the telephones inside them have been removed. Now all the booths do is shelter the occasional homeless person.

There are three phone booths inside the vintage Amtrak train station, built in 1926, just south of downtown.

The wooden booths, lined up side by side, smell faintly of disinfectant. A few names and phone numbers have been scratched on their walls, next to the modern, working phones inside. Now and then travelers such as Christine Wilson step in and make a call.

She leaves the vintage folding door open one recent afternoon as she calls her mother, back home in Philadelphia, to tell her that her train has been delayed, and she’ll be getting back late from her Florida vacation.

“I hate cell phones,” she says. “All you do is answer dumb questions: ‘Where you at?’ ‘I’m in my car.’ ‘Oh, OK. Where you at?’ “

She’s a retro girl in the midst of a nostalgic little scene — the phone booth, the ornate old station, the train waiting just outside. Then the moment passes, Wilson heads out to the platform to catch her train, and the booths are empty once again.

There have been no Save the Pay Phone crusades. But a quirky assemblage of collectors and Web site fans has emerged during the past few years.

A few of the collectors met recently at the Maitland Civic Center, indulging in shop talk about the relative merits of the Western Electric models versus the Gray. Many of them are like local collector Paul Mikula, who’s attracted to the old pay phones partly out of nostalgia and partly because of their sturdy inventiveness.

“A lot of work went into them. For their time, they were pretty efficient devices,” he says.

Mark Thomas, a classical pianist in New York, runs a Web site called the Payphone Project (payphone-project.com). It lists stories about the demise of the pay phone and hundreds of pay phone numbers from all over the world. There are features on “Pay Phones of Africa” and “Pay Phones of Copenhagen.”

There is a list of pay-phone numbers — the pay phone at the Eiffel Tower, the pay phone in the basement of the Vatican Museum. Sometimes, Thomas says, he calls the phone, just to hear a polite man at the other end of the line pick it up and say, “Vatican Museum.”

It sounds a little weird and a little lonely. So does the story of the Mojave desert phone booth.

The booth was installed at the end of a winding, nearly impassable dirt road in a California desert in 1948. Its number was 760-733-9969. Most of the people who used it — and at first, there weren’t many — were workers from a volcanic cinder mine a few miles away.

Then, a few years ago, a picture of the lonely booth, located in what is now the Mojave National Preserve, was mentioned as an oddity on an offbeat Web site (deuceofclubs.com). College students — why is it always college students? — started calling the booth on the off chance that someone would answer. Then they started visiting the booth on the off chance that someone would call.

Soon hundreds of travelers and callers were making a connection. It was a party line, a pay-phone Woodstock, an offbeat throwback to the good old days when a public telephone connected a community.

Naturally, it didn’t last.

The National Park Service, concerned about the delicate desert environment being overrun by trash and traffic, asked the phone company to remove the booth, and in 2000, it did.

REVERSING THE CHARGES

Clyde Lee is 82. He is slender, nimble, blue-eyed, white-haired and lucky.

He has a white groove on his right arm, another on his left, a pale, raised semicircle on his lower jaw where a bullet skirted the bone, and four raised welts on his back.

Seven bullets. Seven scars. “God looks after drunks and fools,” he says. “I wasn’t drunk, so I guess you know what that makes me.”

He has a fat scrapbook filled with newspaper clippings, the biggest of which is the front page of the June 11, 1971, Orlando Evening Star. It features two huge, side-by-side pictures of a shattered phone booth, taking up half the page, beneath the headline: “Clyde Lee Ambushed.”

Five years ago, just after Blackburn died in prison, Lee went to the cemetery to make a solitary visit to the grave of the man who tried to have him killed. The earth was still freshly turned. Lee paused for a moment of reflection and then, with great deliberation, relieved himself on the grave.

Such are the perks of outliving your enemies.

Perhaps Lee will outlive the pay phone, as well. Not that he has any quarrel with the device.

He has a beeper and a cell phone. He needs both for his job as a backstage hand, setting up trade shows for conventions. He says he cannot remember the last time he stepped into a phone booth, or even saw one. But if they ever are revived, he has a suggestion:

“How about bulletproof glass?”

Originally Published: April 13, 2003 at 12:00 AM EDT

James Hamilton, M. D.

Mike,

Really great writing and brought back a lot of memories of those bygone days of what "modern" communication was all about on a day to day level.

Our home phone was a "party line" and I can still remember our phone number: LU(for Ludlow)-9747.

Thanks for the memories (as an old star, Bob Hope, used to sing),

Jim

Michael McLeod

here's a more somber one Jim.

Kinda shook me when I ran across it. 

By Michael Mcleod | Orlando Sentinel

UPDATED: October 25, 2018 at 2:07 AM EDT

The Saturday morning traffic was heavy, as usual, on Colonial Drive in Orlando. Drivers honked at the crowd clustered outside a string of Asian markets and shops, where dancers dressed as lions gyrated on the pavement as long garlands of fireworks exploded to celebrate the first day of the Chinese New Year.

Drums thumped. Cymbals clashed. Shreds of red paper and huge clouds of smoke hovered over the roadway — all of it an ancient tradition meant to bring good luck and frighten away the evil dragons that loom in the skies.

“It is a day of happiness, but now I will always have other memories,” festival organizer Suzie Chan said.

It was an unlucky day in spite of the efforts of the dancers and the drums. The day of thunderous fireworks was absent a sound we had come to take for granted — the double sonic booms that had reassured us, so many times before, that one more space-shuttle crew had come safely home.

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‘THEY TOLD US IT BLEW UP’

After spending an “overnight adventure” at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, 100 fourth-graders from Mirror Lakes Elementary in Lehigh Acres, near Fort Myers, anxiously waited in the VIP area Saturday for space shuttle Columbia to return.

 

 

 

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They knew something had gone wrong, but — perhaps mercifully — had difficulty fully grasping it.

“We waited and waited for the spaceship to come down, but it never did,” said Taylor Grace, 9. “They told us it blew up.”

Hours later, she and her classmates climbed on simulators, gazed at spacesuits and talked of becoming astronauts during a visit to the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame. The Titusville attraction offered free admission Saturday in honor of the Columbia crew.

COUNTDOWN TO NOTHING

For state Sen. Mike Fasano, seeing the KSC countdown clock ticking long past the scheduled arrival of the shuttle remains the most lingering image of Saturday’s disaster.

Fasano, a New Port Richey Republican who chairs a Senate committee overseeing Florida space interests, was among 150 visitors awaiting the shuttle’s arrival.

The first sign of trouble came with word over the KSC public-address system that NASA had lost contact with Columbia, Fasano said. Although no one seemed immediately alarmed, grim-faced NASA personnel within moments began scurrying toward waiting vehicles.

As the minutes stretched past the scheduled 9:16 a.m. arrival, an official turned to Fasano and said, “It’s not going to land. There’s been a problem. We need to go back.”

“I was numb,” Fasano said. “It’s just not something you can comprehend.”

Fifty yards away, Fasano got a glimpse of nearly 50 friends and family members of the shuttle crew being escorted from their bleacher seats.

“Everybody seemed very composed,” Fasano said. “But they were saddened. We all knew that something was very wrong.”

NEWS HITS HARD

Throughout Central Florida, some tourists, taken aback by the tragedy, changed their plans from carefree activities to somber ones. At the Mary Queen of the Universe Shrine in south Orange, New York resident Julianna White, 63, and two of her Orlando friends prayed for the astronauts’ souls and families.

“Right after it happened, we held hands,” White said. “We prayed for the families and nation and said, ‘Please Lord, let it not be terrorists.’ “

Peggy Potter didn’t change her plans. She simply had to deliver the most difficult speech of her life.

The South Carolina motivational speaker, who worked as an engineer for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for 30 years, was scheduled to deliver an inspirational speech to conventioneers at an education conference at the Radisson Twin Towers. “When I got on the stage to do my presentation, they introduced me as having worked at NASA,” said Potter, who now operates a consulting company. “All of a sudden, I had tears in my eyes as I was about to start talking. . . . It’s tough to get everyone pumped up when you’ve just experienced a disaster.”

She made it through the speech — sticking to her inspirational theme — and then went to her hotel room to try to call old NASA friends. None of them answered.

DISTRACTIONS SOUGHT

Some residents simply needed to get away from the news accounts.

“It’s just so sad — I heard about it this morning, and I just couldn’t listen to it anymore because it kept making me sadder and sadder,” said Kalie Hudson, 15, a Boone High student watching the Chinese New Year celebration with her friend Amy Wong, 14.

The Winter Park Village movie-theater complex was packed as usual for a Saturday afternoon. Many moviegoers came to the theater for a distraction.

Stephen Wolf of Winter Park has gone to the movies with his wife and friends almost every Saturday for five years. He spent the early afternoon discussing the tragedy in online forums, but he kept his plans to see The Recruit.

It was a welcome diversion.

“Today, all I could think of was, don’t let it be a terrorist,” said Wolf, 36.

‘HEROES PAST AND PRESENT’

Bob Jones, 64, runs the Curiosity Corner at Renninger’s flea market in Mount Dora. Saturday, customers were especially interested in his space-related memorabilia.

He dusted off a yellowing 1981 issue of the Today newspaper with a headline that reads, “New era dawns; Columbia is GO!” It was priced to sell at $10.

“I won’t change the price,” said Jones, who lives in Ocala.

A short distance away, under oak trees surrounding a frost-burned battlefield, among tents, cook fires and tethered horses, men in Civil War gray and blue were discussing the Columbia disaster.

It was a bizarre juxtaposition of the 19th and 21st centuries at the Battle of Townsend’s Plantation and Civil War Festival, a re-enactment.

But the expressions of sadness were timeless: a minute of silence. Bagpipes wailing “Amazing Grace.” A bugler sounding taps. A military salute from rifles and cannon.

“That’s what we do. We honor our heroes — past and present,” said Pam Borders, who had traveled to the festival from High Springs, near Gainesville, with her husband, Bruce Borders, and their two horses.

“We’re usually an uproarious, fun-loving bunch of folks, but today we were somber,” said Clay Townsend, sponsor of the event, who wore the gray uniform of a Confederate captain.

In the Union camp, Orlando firefighter John Russell, a first sergeant with the 3rd U.S. Colored Cavalry, said Saturday’s battle didn’t have its usual fire.

“We’re out there playing at war and those people, the astronauts, were dying for real. It added a somber note,” he said.

At the Mount Dora Arts Festival, Jan Verbeten and Laurie Vander Velden, both of Winter Garden, stopped to glance at a piece of woven art of a shuttle launch by Jacksonville artist Barbara Baer.

“It’s so sad,” Vander Velden said, tears in her eyes.

Baer’s artwork was inside her booth before she heard of the Columbia accident. Later, she moved it outside and attached a handwritten note that read simply, “In Memory.”

“People just stop, stare and gasp,” she said. “I didn’t know if I should put it out here. But I did it in their memory.”

SOMBER ON THE COAST

At Shuttles Bar & Grill, where astronauts and other space-center workers often slip in, only six people sat watching coverage of the disaster.

Ken Kalata, owner of the restaurant on State Road 3 in Merritt Island just south of the space center, choked back tears as he watched coverage of the disaster.

“I’ve been here since 6 this morning,” said Kalata, reaching for a cigarette. “It’s hard for me to talk about this right now.” Last week, Kalata cooked 1,200 chicken wings to celebrate the rollout of the space shuttle Discovery. He also hosts thank-you parties for astronauts preparing for flight. A few miles away in Titusville, mourners trickled into Space View Park as news of the tragedy spread. Some cried while others stood quietly, staring at the distant launchpad from which Columbia departed earlier this month.

One of those was Debbie Jenkins, 56, of Titusville.

“We feel like whatever happens out there is happening to all of us,” Jenkins said, pointing to KSC across the Indian River. “This is just gut-wrenching.”

A few blocks north of the park, at a monument to all of the astronauts who have died in other accidents, fresh flowers had been placed with a handwritten note reading “God Bless You All and Please Comfort Your Families.”

Earlier in the day, on the Indian River, Larry Fowler, an independent fishing guide, had warned his three out-of-state passengers to be ready.

The shuttle, he told them, would be coming over any minute.

“You’ll know it’s here when you hear the ‘kaboom!’ ” he said.

They waited.

But the sound never came.

Originally Published: February 2, 2003 at 12:00 AM EST

David Mitchell

I still had my folks original phone until about 25 years ago. Sold it at a garage sale. Wished I had kept it.

AM(herst) 3 - 5134

Mark Schweickart

I agree with Jim -- great piece of writing, Mike! Thanks for the memories.  I too remember party lines, but unlike Jim, I am afraid I don't remember my childhood phone number. I recall it starting with "Tuxedo" something, something, something. And now flash-forward to me typing out this note on what is referred to as a "phone," but obviously is something quite more than what we knew as a "phone" way back when.

(Oops, obviously I was typing this while you were then adding your piece about the shuttle catastrophe. Sort of makes my comment here about phones seem  pretty irrelevant.)

David Mitchell

I think I will jump out of order and skip ahead almost a year to explain my remarks about the drainage ditch making me "famous" on that fourth photo I posted above.

It was near the end of my first year and my best buddy - Roger Gump (from Mansfield, Ohio) - our best Cobra Gunship pilot - was at the end of his 365-day tour and headed home the next day.

Three of us had decided to take him out to dinner at the Officers Club, about a 200 foot walk from our hooch area. The building had been built as a warehouse when the base was new, and had a high flat roof that leaked like a sieve during heavy rianfall.

I was one of the four, myself a light drinker. His next best freind, Captain Phil Lange was a moderate drinker. His roomate John Haynes was a non drinking bible totin' Baptist boy from "Al-Bany" Georgia. (another great cobra pilot and super nice guy) And Roger himself was almost an anti-alcohol guy.

We four ordered dinner and someone decided the occasion called for a bottle of champagne. We drank it and I ordered a second bottle of champagne. We drank that bottle and John said he better order a botle since it was his roommate. Then Phil ordered one and finally, Roger decided he should pay us all back by ordering a fourth bottle. By this time we were all getting pretty drunk. But for some reason we ordered two more bottles. Now we were way past being tipsy and high - we were now stinking, slobbering drunk.

Meanwhile the storm was pouring through the ceiling and there was about 3 inches of water on the floor. As we got up to leave, Roger fell and did a faceplant into the water on the floor. We picked him up and made our way to the door. We had to stagger those few hundred yards back to our hooches in the dark.

I have no memory of the walk back and actually never reached my bedroom. The next morning - about 5:00 am - I was awakened by the sun shining in my sore eyes as it rose above my hooch roof. I was laying in the bottom of that ditch with my hips at the very bottom and about a foot of water spanning from my thights to my lower chest. I had been there all night and had a pounding headache. I had apparently fallen off of, or completely missed, the narrow bridge that we had in front of every other hooch - crossing the ditch (see the third photo).  My eyes were sore from lack of sleep and I was covered in mosquito bites and live mosquitos still all over me. 

I had to fly that day and it was the worst day in the cockpit I have ever had to endure!

And get this. Roger overslept and missed his flight back to Saigon to go home. He sat in his hooch all that day and caugh the shuttle flight to Saigon the next day.

--------------

I followed Roger by about two weeks and arrived home on the 23rd of December. About a week later, Roger (who was on leave before being re-assigned to teach flight school in Savannah), and I and a third guy - my good buddy Captain Jim Jackson - my plattoon leader - all went to Colorado for about 8 days of skiing. Roger and I skiied Vail for three days, then he left. Then Jim came from W..VA in his Jaguar XKE (with no ski rack)  and we drove over to Aspen dor about four days. I carried both sets of skis in my lap and chest - with the window part way open for the entire 3 hour trip. Jim and I had extended our tour and were soon back together in Vinh Long for an additional six months.

Michael McLeod

thanks for the compliments. Looking back over that story makes me realize how intimate that must have been for me, sharing the grief with all those strangers as I did the interviews. But i cannot remember anything about it now.

As i may have said i'm compiling a few of my stories and writing a work autobiography for my children.

50 years of writing and i ought to be able to come up with a dozen or so samples to represent the work.

i may post a couple of them if i think you would enjoy but i don't want to be overbearing and pretentious beating my chest about it. one thing about writing is that it is so damn hard, least it usually was for me, that it humbles you. 

it also makes me feel senile now when i run across lengthy stories that i have no memory of writing. but i can tell, and i do remember, that i damn well suffered and sweated out to craft them. there were bursts of inspiration but they were always hard won.

if you asked me to tell you the most significant thing i can say about writing i'd say two things.

one: it is rewarding as hell to think i served and entertained and informed, if only for a few moments, thousands of people i will never meet. I wasn't in their living room but, even better, i was in their minds, entertaining them, informing them, teasing them a little if i could tuck a clever phrase or a little gem or joke or insight into a story. that still feels like a miracle to me.

and again, damn, writing is hard. it got somewhat easier as i learned the discipline and the strategies but it was rarely, very rarely, easy to come by in anything but sweaty third-draft bursts.

i should come up with a list of people i met and/or interviewed. Paul McCartney would be at the top of the list. I met him briefly at a small art gallery here in orlando but did not interview him. I did, however, get his signature on a help album that already had the sigs of the three other fab four members on it already. my ex wife, who lived in london as a young woman, had gotten sigs of john  george and ringo on the album years before when she was one of those young screaming fab4 nut cases that you can see now in all those ancient film clips.

So yes I did interview a few celebs over the years but i never asked for a signature because I thought it was unprofessional. When it came to a beatle I had to make an exception. 

Paul was very softspoken and gracious and noticed out loud that i had the other three sigs on the album already.

my ex has the album and as i understand it she has it cushioned in some sort of hyperbaric situation. i'm not sure i have that exactly right but you get the picture. it's not worth as much as i thought it would be in dollars and cents. couple hundred bucks is what i have been told. but it's priceless in my heart.

Michael McLeod

and hah, mark, remembering when we remembered phone numbers with words. there's a nostagia note for you.

my old phone when i was a kid living on east north broadway just a couple blocks east of immaculate conception church was amherst 2 1203. still remember it.

John Maxwell

David Mitchell

Jack,

Forgot all about the "MARS" relay call setup until you brought this up. I remember using it two or three times to call home, and since it was partly a radio (relay) call, we had to say "Over" each time we finished speaking.

We also had to avoid certain specific information and I had to use sort of coded language in one importetant call to my dad. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I seem to remember our calls were monitored and we could get cut off if we said something too specific about where were were, or what we were doing.

Michael McLeod

Jack! Now I remember! YOU"RE the guy who taught me how to hotwire a pay phone. My parents were right. You were a bad influence on saintly little me. I bet I would have been a priest if it hadn't been for your bad influence. Well that and my hormones.

Joseph D. McCarthy

An interruption to add my1/2 cent of info.

Our phone number on Virginia Ave, just North of Fifth Avenue, was originally KLondike 2228.  Later it was changed to AXminister 4-2228. 

I wonder if anyone else had a special phone line during the 1950's and early 1960's.  Our home number was the above, but at some time during that period, and I believe into the 1970's the phone at my parent's business was exactly the same number.  This way people could contact my parents 24 hours-a-day.

James Hamilton, M. D.

"Number, Pleeease!'

Do operators still exist?

Jim

Michael McLeod

lol at remembering our juvenile delinquent days. 

fortunately the statute of limitations is on our side.

Joseph D. McCarthy

Does anyone  ever remember using a "Criss-Cross" (phone) directory?

David Mitchell

Not me. Give us a clue Joe.

Joseph D. McCarthy

Thanks Dave, you just had to ask instead of waiting for an intelligent answer.

First, remember the telephone book, an item with more pages than the Sears catalog.

The regular telephone book would allow one to look-up the phone numbers, and addresses of people in the area where you were located.  As long as they didn't have an unlisted number.  Example might have been Woody Hayes who didn't appreciate calls after a game asking why (Woody) didn't use Dave during the game.

A "Criss-Cross" directory contained everone who had a phone.  Not only were the names and phone numbers listed, but street addresses.  There were two sections ( a Criss and a Cross)  one listing by Name with street and phone number, and the second was a listing by (as I remember) Street then Name and phone number.  They were usually something that businesses purchased separetly from the phone companies.

My parents purchased a new one every year for use in their business.  One or more of my classmates from that other school found out that my parents had access to the "Criss-Cross".  Then the trouble began.  Let's say one of them was named, oh let's say, Dave.  Dave might want to impress Caroline who he had met at Jerry's drive-in.  To show off he would ask her Last Name and the street, no number, she lived on.  With that information he would very nicely ask me to provide a phone number that went with the last name and street.

You get the idea.  I believve you can still find "Criss-Cross" directories in some used book stores and in the main libraries.

David Mitchell

I have a memory of only one phone book. It was about 2 inhes thick with a few pages of emergency numbers, followed by "White Pages" (residential) and finally the  "Yellow Pages" (business). I believe that's still in use isn't it Joe.

We have a tiny version of that publishhed every year for our Bluffton/Hilton Head area.

David Mitchell

In the past few days, we have celebrated Juneteenth, the day in which emancipation finally reached the last group of enslaved African Amerians in Galveston Texas - about two years AFTER Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclimation. 

I have become more aware of it since living here, as I have visited one of our local Black churches - Campbell Chapel AME (African Methodist Episcopal) on numerous occaisions. I was, for about four years, the first and only white peson to join their Community Association. Boy, did I ever get an ear-full in that experience. I still count about a half dozen of them to be good friends, though I do not see them as often as I once did.

Over the years, I have met a number of the pastors who have come through the rotation of this church. One in particular has become a good friend. Although he has been elevate to a sort of regional director, (and is no longer the resident pastor), I hope to seee him for lunch very soon. He and I met when he was the "event Chaplain" and I was the guest speaker at a Memorial Day service for the town of Bluffton. He had been the head chaplain at Walter Reed Army hospital in DC (over 7 other chaplains). He has two divinity degrees and three science degrees and is one heck of an interesting fellow.

But there were a few years that I was not attending while they had a popular new pastor who was really well loved by all. He was also a So. Carolina state legislator - respected and liked by both parties. His name was Clemente Pinkney.  How I wish I had been to services while he was there - he sounded like a legendary human being.

A few days ago we marked the tenth anniversary of the "Emanuel Nine", the day in which that same Pastor Pinkney and eight of his parishioners were murdered in their prayer group by a young white racist sicko at his new assigment at Mother Emanuel AME Church up in Charleston.

I thought you might be uplifted by this brief TV interview of his daughter.

Joseph D. McCarthy

In an attempt to answer your question Dave.  Yes some areas of the country still issue "Phone Books" that are usually just for limited areas.  Today it is for towns, burgs and small cities rather than the counties.

Directory (411) services have mostly gone to private companies under contract with your phone provider.  I audit one of those back in the early 1990's.  Today a lot of it is by firms in India or online.  

to provide more info on "Criss-Cross" I asked Bing, you can use Goggle or any other service.

Something went wrong.  Sorry.

Michael McLeod

thanks for that post, Dave.

I'm so senile that when I saw it today I thought I must have posted it myself.

It's the kind of thing that would have struck me and compelled me to share. But still. Cue the cuckoo.

speaking of senility either I am terribly forgetfull or the grass in florida grows so fast at this time of year that i swear I wake up every other day realizing I need to go out front with the mower, where senility meets heat stroke.

Michael McLeod

David Mitchell

FIRST NIGHT - FIRST WEEK    Continued

 - after funny Christmas Eve radio call.......

Christmas Day was uneventful. I did little more than sit around and visit the mess hall to eat. But the day after Christmas, one of the guys poked his head into my cubicle and said “Hey, we’ve got a Huey goin’ down the river to Dong Tam to see the Bob Hope Show. Wanna go along?” I didn’t have to think twice.              

  “Of course!” I said - and grabbed my hat.  

    We jumped into a jeep and headed for the flight line. A couple guys were already there so there were about 6 of us on board for the short 15 or 20-minute flight. We landed and parked on their airfield and walked into the base. Dong Tam was not a Vietnamese town you would find on the map, but a purpose-built American base for the large 9th Infantry Division and a small detachment of Navy river boats. Though a rather bare bones airfield, it had an outdoor theater with a stage and bandshell. The seating was several hundred telephone poles laid on end in rows the shape of an amphitheater. It probably held 1,000 to 1,500 guys. We would soon learn that these shows always started late - very late - for security reasons. So, we sat. And sat. And sat.

    Hope’s cast on this trip included Anne Margaret and yes, she knocked us out, dancing and singing in a tiny black outfit and heels. Bob also had Cincinnati Reds Catcher Johnny Bench and Rosie Greer. And Miss Universe from Australia. I cannot recall her name, but he did a skit with her that still sticks in my memory. 

   Bob was wearing a burlap bag dress and a long scraggly wig while she stood by him in a long, slinky, sequined dress and heels. As Bob leaned his head on her chest doing some silly jokes, there was the sudden sound of weapons firing. They could not see it from the stage, but seated well back in audience, we could see over the bandshell and to our right about an eight of a mile. A “B-model” Huey gunship had dipped its nose and was firing rockets down on some .51 caliber tracers coming back up at it. Bob stopped - frightened, lifted his head and yelled, “What the hell is all that firing?  General, would you call off this war while we’re on please.”

(posted this video before - found the video by accident 40+ years after the fact)

Enjoy the hole video again - look close at 6:12 on the timer - right after Raquel Welch and  

a Phylis Diller interviews. Bob on stage at Dong Tam - Dec 26th, '68. I'm in that audience.

David Mitchell

Her name was Penny Plummer.

You have no idea how much Bob's shows meant to us - and how much this video gets to me - after 57 years.