A Phone Story

by Anonymous

In 1968, I became a student at a very large state university which will remain unnamed.

I lived in a dorm which at that time did not have telephones in the rooms.  There were payphones at the end of the halls on each floor.  These were Bell System phones with dials that required you to put money in (ten cents at that time) before you would get a dial tone.

If you hung up before completing the call, or if the person you were calling did not answer, the mechanism inside would be electrically activated to cause your money to drop back into the coin return.

If your call went through, the inner mechanism worked the opposite way and caused your money to drop into the coin box inside the telephone.

Also, if you wanted to make a long distance call, you had to dial the operator and give her the number, and she would tell you how much to put in for the first three minutes.  (Back then, the minimum length of a long distance call was three minutes.)  If the call went through, she would push a button or something to cause the money to go into the coin box; if it didn't go through, no answer, was busy, etc., she would push another button and the money would come back to you in the coin return.

If you talked longer than three minutes, she would come on the line after the person you were talking to hung up and tell you how much additional money to put in to pay for the rest of it.  (Also, back then all the telephone operators were women.)

Somehow, and I don't remember exactly how, I discovered that, if you could find the telephone junction box where the wires went from the phone line into the payphone, you could make "free" phone calls by disconnecting the yellow wire (which I think was a ground wire) after the dial tone was obtained.

This disconnected the mechanism inside the phone that caused the coins to either go into the coin box or come back to you in the coin return.  You could also make "free" long distance calls by calling the operator and putting in the amount of money for the call.  In either case, you would wait until after the call was finished, and if you had made a long distance call that lasted longer than three minutes, you put in additional money which the operator told you to put in after you finished.  You would just hang up the phone, wait a few seconds, pick it back up, reconnect the wire, get the dial tone back, and hang up again, and it would send all the money you had deposited into the coin return.

In the case of a long distance call, the operator would ask you for the number you were calling from, and you would give her the number of another payphone somewhere else.  So if they came up short when they counted the money, it would not be tracked to that phone.  I shared this method with a bunch of other friends in the same dorm, and there were quite a few "free" long distance calls made that year.  (And, of course, they all thought I was a genius for figuring this out and letting them in on it.)

This would only work if you could get access to the wires.

In some cases, they went through the wall to the back of the phone and were inaccessible, but in at least one case there was a phone booth that had one of the little square four-screw junction boxes right under the shelf that the phone sat on, and that made it real easy.

In another case, there was one with the wires going into it (this was your standard four-conductor telephone cable) and someone cut into the cable to find the right wire and cut it and spliced it back together to use this method.

I think the phone repair service had to be called a couple of times because I saw some those little conical plastic insulators on the wires.  I thought it was a wonder they didn't remove the phone.  I have to wonder if they ever figured out what was going on.

Of course, this was just plain and simple stealing, and I am not particularly proud of it now, although I will take credit for figuring it out.

Some years later, I made as much of an estimate as I could of the cost of all the calls that I (or any of the rest of the "free users") might have made, and I came up with the figure of $125 (remember this was back in the late-1960s), and sent the phone company an anonymous letter explaining it, along with a money order for that amount.

Obviously, this whole scenario is most likely completely obsolete now with all of the modern technology, cell phones, prepaid calling cards, Caller ID, etc.

I don't know if it would even work with the payphones they have now which all will give you a dial tone (and let you call 911 or the operator) without depositing money into the phone, not to mention the fact that payphones seem to be an endangered species anyway.  (I only use them now to call toll-free numbers when I don't want to use up minutes on my cell phone.)