It's for you

My friend Tom posted this photo of me today in Facebook. Ha, fun for me to see and remember. I'm guessing it's the only photo record of this school antic.

In 10th grade, I found a dial phone in the garbage. I took it home and disassembled it out of curiosity. I liked seeing why the dial mechanism spun at a constant speed when released and how the amount of rotation was converted to a pulse for the selected number.

Hey, there's my best friend from high school, my constant sidekick, Paul Morgan. On a rainy day in high school, I found a damaged umbrella. I yanked all the fabric off so it was just a wireframe and handed it to Paul. It was lunchtime, and folks had poured out of classrooms and were now crowded in the sheltered outdoor walkways, waiting for the rain to break. Paul made his way around to the far end of the courtyard and then calmly walked the longest diagonal across the yard, wire frame over his head, rain pouring down like it rarely poured down. Laughter all around the yard. Someone threw food his direction. Paul plodded along, unswayed, soaked.

The internal bell mechanism looked like what I had seen on the outside of alarm clocks: two inverted brass cups or bells with a ball hammer between them. Though the main mechanism was an electrical-coil solenoid, a structural member nearby, if tapped right, would bang the hammer into one bell, and the spring action would ring the other bell. With rapid taps with my piano-trained finger, I could make the ring sound like someone was calling.

Hm, an idea. I severed the handset from the base, with coiled extension intact. I secured the cut end in my left pants pocket and fed the handset up inside my coat and hooked the handset in the pit of my left sleeve. I put the bell mechanism in in my right coat pocket. And so began a long period of my carrying this gag phone in my coat at high school.

In college, I soldered an 1/8" jack to the end of the extension and put that in the earphone jack of the mini-tape recorder I used to capture college lectures. I put some classical music on a tape. Now I could listen to music through the handset--a ridiculous substitute for the popular Sony Walkman tape player/headphones (the iPod of the '80s).

The typical setup was this: I'd have my hands in my coat pockets, get near someone who didn't know I had this phone (including complete strangers) and hammer the mechanism to ring the bell. Heads would turn a bit as folks reacted to the familiar sound that was out of place. (Hey, remember, this was waaaay before cell phones brought noise outside for everyone to enjoy.) Shortly after, I'd reach down into my coat and pull the handset from my armpit and say "Hello?" (which would help them know where to look to finish their thought). First timers were still forming thoughts about a phone cord connected mysteriously inside my coat. "It's for you" worked well (I'd extend the phone to them, stretching the cord). Or I might say things that made little sense when you don't know what's being said on the other end, like, "No, not today, I left it at home". Or declare "Wrong number." Hooking the handset back inside my coat and bringing my empty hand back out and going about my business--it was always wonderful to observe reactions.

I was in a school play at the end of that school year. In the last performance (the "oh who cares what anyone thinks" performance), I stuck the handset into the armpit of my outfit. I was at the front center in one particular singing/dancing scene and found a time that I could pull the phone out and put it to my ear briefly and put it back away without any fellow dancers having a clue. Family members were there for that last performance and I heard my brother's shout from the darkness, over the music, "He's got his phone!" Satisfying.