West Island phone booth cemetery, a reminder of an era of box-and-coin communications

Photo by Stephen Pickford

    Is it an art installation? A museum exhibit saluting obsolete communications?
    No it's about three dozen disconnected Montreal phone booths sitting in the snow at the end of dead-end Gun Street just east of Hymus and St. John's Blvd.
   To think of the conversations these booths heard before reaching their snowy West Island grave.
   Do you remember the last time you used a pay phone?
   Try to recall because your grandchildren will you about them one day.
    You can sit those little darlings on your knee and then tell them how phone booths were useful for making your extortion threats, kidnapping demands and secret obscene phone calls.
   I cannot recall any memorable phone booth moment but I had quite some knowledge of them from my days as a phone operator.
    Bell Canada ensured that all phone booths could not accept phone calls because they feared getting nailed for an international collect call, so Ma Bell went to great lengths to prevent such fraudulent calls.
   Any collect call coming into Canada from overseas had to be thoroughly scrutinized, the operator would check with another office called rates and routes to "check for coin."
   The other operator, whose task must have been super boring, usually ensured that it was not a phone booth receiving the collect call.  
   The fourth digit in a phone booth number was almost always a zero or a nine, which was a way of tipping an operator off.
   Once in the early 80s a Polish immigrant to Canada called our office in an attempt to phone her  family from a phone booth somewhere in Canada.
   Her request was a totally frivolous task because such calls never got through during those Soviet years.
    Suddenly the call was connected and her family was reunited by telephone. They shared a blissful moment on the phone but I had failed to collected the $12 painstakingly inserted quarter after quarter and registered by the sound they made.
   To have stopped their call and insist on immediate payment would have been folly as the line would undoubtedly have been cut by then and Bell would have had to somehow refund the woman's coins. Plus I didn't have the heart to interrupt such a joyous and unlikely moment
  So I let them talk for free until the line got snipped by the Soviets.
  To my amazement the woman stayed on the line after her call ended and put the money in even though she could easily have just walked away.
   The experience reinforced my hope for humanity.
   What is your best phone booth story? Add it in the comments section below.