Calling the Mall

The first true phone story in the series I threatened you with last week.

As kids we, of course, indulged in prank calls and what not.  At that tender young age I wasn’t even sure who Prince Albert was or why he would be in a can, but I did inform several local vendors about the risk of suffocation in such a situation.

Look, at the time the precursor to the internet was barely a thing, VCRs were not yet readily available, and television was boring until at least 3pm, so we had to find something to fill the time.

ARAPnet in 1973 – Every machine connected to it detailed

There was little fear of repercussions.  Caller ID was being discussed at Bell Labs, but the standards and implementation were still years off.  There was no *69 to call back the person who just called… hell, there were still a lot of rotary phones out there because AT&T charged extra for TouchTone dialing as a service so that, well into the 80s, even phones without a rotary dial had to have a “pulse dialing” option switch.

The phone company eventually decided that supporting pulse dialing was costing them more than they were earning from TouchTone service charges and gave up on that.

Anyway, the main hazards were our voices being recognized… unlikely, but we were dumb and would generally crank call places we frequented… the intervention of parents… three per-pubescent boys on the phone and laughing was a pretty likely warning sign we were up to something and all the more so when the phone was in the middle of the kitchen… being ratted out by siblings, and the inventions of our own minds based on what people would yell at us when being cranked, like getting the phone company or the FCC or the local police phone tracing unit after us.

I would actually have a run-in with the FCC for phone based shenanigans later, but that is another story.

Anyway, in an effort to broaden the scope of our phone line fun, somebody had the bright idea to write down the phone numbers for all of the phone booths at the local mall… the brand new Vallco Shopping Mall, the first indoor mall in the area… noting their locations with an idea that we could do something with that information.

Our first use of the numbers was to simply go home and call them to see who would answered.

It was a simpler time and the idea of a pay phone just randomly ringing seemed pretty funny to us just on its face.  We lived in an affluent suburb, The Wire was still decades away, so calling a phone booth seemed like a strange new experience.  We would do things like ring all the phones in a bank in a row, one ring each, with our imagination running wild at the possible responses.  But, really, we wanted to get somebody to take the bait, to pick up the line.

And, people would occasionally answer, though we would have to let the phone ring for ages at times.  Somebody answering a strange phone is often quite tentative, at least in Cupertino in the late 70s.  As usual, we hadn’t worked through WHAT to do when people answered, and started off by demanding to know why they answered the phone, a line that, while amusing, often led to an abrupt termination of the call.

We got more sophisticated… relatively speaking… over time and built up a couple of routines, starting with simple things like asking if our friend/sibling/parent was there, being an oblivious wrong number caller expecting a business, and reaching our pinnacle with a random survey with a chance to win $100.  Most people hung up, a few would get involved, and on a rare occasion we would get somebody we knew, the mall being a gathering place for most of our peers at that age. (And at least one of those was a member of our group who was pretty sure who was calling when he heard the payphone ringing.)

The problem with all of this was that we wanted to see how the person was reacting.  Our imagination was not enough, we wanted to get a live viewing.

The problem was, while we all had local dialing plans, which was a flat monthly rate for unlimited local calls… and we had that map of free prefixes memorized because incurring a toll was a surefire way to get unwanted and unhappy parental attention… to actually be on the ground meant using a payphone ourselves.

There were several locations at the mall well setup for this, where one group of phones was within line of sight of another big bank of phones in a prime, high traffic location.  (There were a lot of payphones at the mall in retrospect.)  The bank outside of what was then Bullocks at a bend in the mall was a favorite target because there was another single phone booth in a corner from which you could see it.

Vallco as I remember it, phone bank highlighted

The key problem was that it cost money to use a payphone… hence the name “pay” phone.  The cost of a call had jumped to 20 cents.. so the phrase “dropping a dime” was already antiquated… and as somebody who was getting an allowance of $2.00 a week, that was a substantial investment.  I had already sworn off comic books, as they had jumped in price to 35 cents, and a one way bus ride on the country transit was, at 20 cents, a better investment for me, especially since for double that I could get a day pass and ride around the valley all day.

So we would be sitting there at the mall, maybe ready to invest 40 cents in a gag, but really needing it to pay off.  If somebody just picked up then hung up on us, that was cash money down the drain.

But this was also a time of AT&T attempting to expand its services.  This was the start of the era of the calling card, where they wanted you to be able to use a payphone but be able to charge it to your home phone bill as a convenience.

The whole system was pretty loose.  You could, at times, just give them your home phone number and they would just make the connection without checking.  If they thought you sounded kind of young, they might call the number to check, but mostly they just patched you through and would bill the number you gave them.  It was much easier than trying to swing a collect call, for example.

We obviously were not going to bill calls to our actual home phone numbers, but we had this list of payphone numbers on a piece of paper in our pocket… and a plan was hatched; charge calls to payphones.

We just wanted to call across the mall and save ourselves 20 cents, but found out pretty quickly that this service did not apply to local calls.  Some experimenting did find, however, that if we wanted to call long distance, the whole thing would work.

So our attention was drawn away from calling the mall payphones… though we still did that from home… and on to essentially defrauding the phone company by making free long distance calls.

We had a couple of problems to overcome.  The first was that we clearly didn’t want to leave any evidence to tie us to the crime, so calling Uncle Bill in Duluth was out, lest the phone company follow up and ask who called at a specific time and date.

The second was, absent some relatives, we didn’t actually have anybody to call long distance.  And, when dealing with an operator back then, everything had to sound normal and routine lest you raise suspicion.  The moment you sound like you don’t know what you’re doing, it breaks the routine and the operator may begin to suspect they should look deeper into your request.

Our first plan involved a bus ride over to the library which, back in the day, had a rack of local phone books from around the country.  I knew this because my grandmother had a masters degree in library science and spent a chunk of her career running the reference desk at a public library. (During the war she worked at NACA at Moffett Field catalogue research data from the wind tunnel tests.)  The reference desk was all you had before the internet, somebody you could phone up, during business hours, and ask questions like the area code for Duluth, how many seasons was Ty Cobb both a player AND the manager for the Detroit Tigers, and did we really have a president named Millard Fillmore. (She would also officiate a few of the Friends of Millard Fillmore Trivia Hunts, a one time weekend event for high school students in our area that involved school based teams using library reference materials to find answers to obscure questions.  The internet killed that as dead as it did the local classified ads section in the paper.)

Anyway, we came up with some phone numbers and were able to make some long distance crank calls.  About one in four times the operator would check the number we were charging to, see it was a payphone, and start to scold us… at which point we would hang up and flee the scene, heading for another bank of payphones to try again.

In hindsight, that there were live operators handling this, dealing with people in general and kids like us constantly, and in enough numbers that we never got the same operator on consecutive calls, seems kind of crazy.  How things have changed.

The thing was, that long distance crank calls are really no sweeter than cross town crank calls.  So that died off, though not before we pushed the envelope a bit and did some international crank calls.

Fortunately, the phone book… one of which was hanging from a cable at each payphone… had instructions and numbering schemes for international dialing.  So we reached out to touch some people overseas, culminating in something of an anticipation of Bart Simpson, several calls to random phone numbers in Australia, that being the furthest away location we could come up with.

And what do you say to people you’ve called, at random, in the middle of the night their time, on the other side of the world?  I don’t recall us being exactly brilliant in our method, usually just shouting that we were calling from America and maybe getting some complete lack of comprehension or obscenity followed by a rapid disconnect.

All of this occupies a larger than realistic time frame in my internal calendar, like we were doing this for a couple of years.  But I suspect it was more likely an focused activity of a group of us for a couple of months at most before we grew bored of the whole thing and went on to some other obsession… though I did keep that list of payphone numbers from mall for quite a while and we would, at a time of nothing to do and no parents around, ring those phones again just to see who would pick up.

These days seeing a payphone is a picture worthy event… because I’ll take the picture with my smart phone, which has all but supplanted the need for having public, coin operated phones, scattered across the landscape.