Superman has a real problem in Columbus. In fact, the situation is no better anywhere else in the state or around the nation.
The defender of “truth, justice and the American way” has almost no place to go to strip off his business suit, fling aside his glasses and don his blue crime-fighter tights and flowing red cape.
The problem is phone booths, or rather, the disappearance of phone booths. Those convenient dressing rooms that once dotted the city landscape are gone.
If you are under 20, you probably don’t know what I am talking about. If you are under 30, you probably have never seen one. If you are under 40, you probably can remember seeing one, but the odds are you never made a call from one.
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In fact, not only are the glass and metal booths gone, but the coin-operated pay phones themselves are as scarce as cuff links (whatever those are) at a nudist convention. Why would anyone need a coin-operated pay phone these days since nearly everyone is walking around or driving around with a cellphone attached to his or her ear?
Yet, a few coin phones survive around Columbus. No booths, as far as I know, but a handful of telephones. I drove around town looking for them recently (I have a very boring life) and located three: two in working order and one just hanging out on a street corner, “dead as a doornail.” (Which brings up the question of what a doornail is and why did it die. I will leave that for another column.)
A website from 1997 lists 194 numbers for pay phones in Columbus, but since AT&T got out of the business and sold its phones to hundreds of small “service providers” 10 years ago the list has not been updated. Evidently, the local pay phones are now owned by Pacific Telemanagement Services (PTS) in Walnut Creek, California.
Their website says they are the largest provider of pay phones in the United States, with 45,000 of the 100,000 phones left. (I called them from one of their pay phones to try to find out how many of those are in Columbus, but no one answered, and I lost my money.)
As recently as 2000, 2.2 million pay phones were in operation nationwide — owned by AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and the likes. PTS bought 50,000 of them, and the rest were divided among more than 800 smaller companies scattered from state to state and city to city.
I guess that outside of Superman (and Maxwell Smart of the old TV series “Get Smart,” who used a phone booth for his office), few people really care that the coin phones are gone or going.
I imagine that if a solar flare or a tornado took out the cell towers and I needed to order a pizza, a coin-operated pay phone would be convenient. The problem would be that I don’t often carry coins in my pocket. I use a credit or debit card, even it I am just buying an ice cream cone. If I accidentally end up with coins in my pocket at the end of the day, I drop them in a jar on my desk.
I am not sure who now uses the coin phones. Logic says it would be those who cannot afford cellphones. Yet the federal government has subsidized the telephone bills of low-income people since 1985. In recent years, the so-called “Obama cellphones” have been available free or at minimum cost for those who qualify.
The few operating coin phones left in Columbus now charge 50 cents for local calls and $1 for a 2-minute call “worldwide.”
So, why did I waste your time telling you all of this? Just nostalgia, I guess, and a bit of serious concern about Superman. He deserves better.
Bud Herron is a retired editor and newspaper publisher who lives in Columbus. He served as publisher of The Republic from 1998 to 2007. His weekly column appears on the Opinion page. Contact him at [email protected]. Send comments to [email protected].
