Arkansas phone booth is first of its kind to make National Register of Historic Places

Phone booth historic, hello? Prairie Grove 1959 site put on national list

Prairie Grove teenagers Mason McCourt (left) and Blake Williams use the telephone booth on U.S. 62 in Prairie Grove in April, when the booth was first nominated to the National Register of Historic Places. (NWA Democrat-Gazette file photo)

By Bill Bowden
Arkansas Online

A telephone booth in Prairie Grove has become the first structure of its kind to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The 56-year-old Airlight outdoor booth was selected for nomination in April by the state review board of the Arkansas Historic Preservation Program.

But there was a hang-up.

The National Park Service had reservations about putting a phone booth on the list, said Ralph Wilcox, the National Register/survey coordinator for the state's Historic Preservation Program. It had never been done before.

The "listing blurs the line between a 'place' and an artifact, and it begs the questions about where the line between significance and nostalgia is drawn," according to the response that the National Register sent to Wilcox in July.

Wilcox had to convince the decision-makers that the phone booth is "truly significant."

He resubmitted the nomination, emphasizing that the Airlight "represented a new and advanced design for the telephone booth."

For one thing, it was intended to be outdoors.

Before the Airlight was developed in 1954, telephone booths were made of wood and were inside buildings, Wilcox wrote.

The Airlight's metal-and-glass construction could hold up to the elements, he said. And this booth was strategically placed to serve the motoring public -- on U.S. 62 in front of the Colonial Motel and across from the entrance of Prairie Grove Battlefield State Park.

With that ringing recommendation, the phone booth was officially listed on the National Register on Nov. 9.

"It is my understanding that this is the first and only telephone booth listed on the National Register," Wilcox said Thursday.

Airlight phone booths were once common along highways across America.

According to the nomination form, there were 2.6 million pay phones in the United States by 1996.

But, while pay phones still exist, phone booths have become harder to find since cellular phones took over the market.

The Prairie Grove phone booth is rare in Arkansas because it has a working telephone, Wilcox said. The only other one in the state that he knows of is in Bluffton in Yell County, where there's no cellphone service.

David Parks, president of Prairie Grove Telephone Co., said he's not sure when the company put the phone booth in, but he believes it was around 1959.

Parks said Wilcox notified him Thursday about the National Register listing.

"I'm happy," Parks said. "It's just a little hard to believe. I mean, who would have thought? I'm tickled. I really am."

Parks said there are no plans for a plaque outside the phone booth.

Parks said he thought about removing the phone booth years ago but decided to leave it up for nostalgia's sake. He said it yields $3 to $4 in change per year.

Patrick Andrus, a historian who has been with the National Register for 35 years, told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in April that the Prairie Grove submission was the first nomination that he knew of for a telephone booth.

Andrus said the National Register lists five types of properties: buildings, districts, sites, structures and large objects, such as outdoor fountains.

Generally, properties must be at least 50 years old to be listed on the National Register, which is administered by the National Park Service.

Telephone booths were part of American culture throughout the 20th century. Countless villains and heroes ducked into phone booths as movie plots unfolded.

A mild-mannered reporter could enter a phone booth and emerge as Superman. A telephone booth even saved Tippi Hedren from avian attackers in Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 movie The Birds.

Whether the Prairie Grove phone booth has ever served such a purpose isn't known, but it is an "excellent example" of the aluminum-and-glass phone booths that were developed for Bell Telephone System in 1954, according to the National Register nomination form.

It was also nominated for its "importance in the communications history of Prairie Grove."

Airlight phone booths were used for decades. Each booth had a red panel at the top of all four sides, with the word "TELEPHONE" in white letters.

The telephone is in one corner, and the booth has a "bifold door."

"Its aluminum and glass construction was durable enough to stand up to the elements and the amount of glass along with the louvers on the sides allowed its namesake elements -- air and light -- to flood the booth," according to the nomination form. The Airlight booths also had fluorescent overhead lights.

The phone booth is a tourist attraction on U.S. 62 across from Prairie Grove Battlefield State Park.

People often stop at the booth to take pictures.

In June 2014, a motorist driving a 2003 Chevrolet Tahoe dozed off and ran into the Prairie Grove booth, knocking it from its concrete foundation in front of the Colonial Motel.

A public outcry on the city's Facebook page led Parks to fix it. The phone booth was repaired and reinstalled that August.

Mojave Phone Booth rights acquired

PRWeb Press Release



Los Angeles, CA (PRWEB) -- Paragon Pictures Inc. and Westlake Entertainment Inc. have joined forces in the strategic acquisition of multi- award winning HD feature film "Mojave Phone Booth. The companies have acquired exclusive rights to distribute the film and will split responsibility for the worldwide release.

"Mojave Phone Booth" Starring Annabeth Gish ("The X-Files", "Pursuit of Happiness") and Steve Guttenberg ("Veronica Mars", "P.S. Your Cat is Dead"), is story about an abandoned phone booth that sits in the middle of the Mojave Desert. It's filled with bullet holes, covered in graffiti, and the windows are broken. However troubled its' outside appearance, it is functional. For years its identity was exploited over the internet, and travelers would take the long trip down a dirt road to visit the site in hopes of receiving a phone call from a stranger in a distant country.

"Mojave Phone Booth" is a prime example of fine, independent film making at its best; it's about four disparate people whose lives intersect at this phone booth in the Mojave Desert. There's Beth (Annabeth Gish), whose had troubles in her love life and ties to a mysterious crime; Mary (Tinarie Van Wyk-Loots) a South African woman contemplating prostitution as a means to save herself; Alex (Christine Elise, "Cactus kid") a woman that believe her lover is possessed by aliens, and Richard (Robert Romanus, "Going Shopping"), desperate to end his life after a separation from his wife. The phone booth works as a meeting point for interconnectivity, sending us deep into the lives and psyches of these disturbed individuals.

Written by John Putch and Jerry Rapp, and Directed by John Putch this film is based on an actual phone booth (which accepted incoming calls) isolated in the Mojave Desert. Callers from many countries dialed (619) 733-9969 later (760) 733-9969 to see who would answer (often people who hiked to the spot). The phone was removed at the request of the Mojave National Preserve in 2000 and per SBC policy the phone booth numbers were retired for good.

NPS: The Mojave Phone Booth Incident

Neglected SpaceTo Protected Place: An Administrative History of Mojave National Preserve by Eric Charles Nystrom, March 2003

Excerpt from "Chapter Six: Park Management and Administration"

Every national park has had to face problems that arise from visitors' expectations that differ from the course of action required by the Park Service's mission, but Mojave National Preserve has seemingly faced more than its share of these issues, chiefly because of the area's governance under BLM's much more lenient rules less than a decade ago. One of the most unusual incidents began as a minor movement of performance art enthusiasts and their followers rose to international prominence as they worshiped the object of their affection - a lonely telephone booth, at the end of a long string of poles. Park Service employees were amused at first, but chuckles turned to concerns as visitor traffic increased and booth enthusiasts left behind offerings of art and junk, like pilgrims at a pop culture shrine. Concerned about impacts to desert resources, aware of the expiration of Pacific Bell's right-of-way, and unmoved by the apparently frivolous arguments of the phone booth users, the NPS ensured the booth's removal. Booth enthusiasts flooded Mojave headquarters with angry emails and phone calls, and charged the Park Service with only welcoming certain kinds of visitors with open arms, the counterculture's retread of the argument used by almost any group that finds the NPS mission in the way of their personal use of a public place.

A telephone was placed in the California desert around 1948 along a telephone line that stretched from Highway 91 through the east Mojave to Route 66. The idea was to provide local cinder miners with a means of communication with the outside world. The phone itself, known as "Cinder Peak 2," had to be cranked by hand. Emerson Ray, owner and operator of the nearby Cima Cinder Mine, requested the installation of the booth. Sometime in the mid-1960's the phone was replaced with a regular payphone, which was upgraded again sometime in the late 1980s as touch-tone payphones became the norm. [236]

The phone had long been listed on American Automobile Association maps of the area - the word "Telephone" at the junction of a couple of dirt roads. Early visitors to the booth were lured to the area by the apparent incongruity of a telephone seemingly in the middle of nowhere, 15 miles from a paved road. In May 1997, one traveler wrote a letter to a fan "'zine" for the Washington band "Girl Trouble," describing the remote phone. This fired the imagination of Godfrey Daniels, a Tempe, Arizona-based computer programmer and sometime artist, who resolved to call the booth's number every day until he received a response. His breakthrough occurred in late June 1997, less than a month after he started calling, when he reached Lorene Caffee, operator of the local cinder mine, as she made calls from the booth. [237] Daniels, in a transcript of the phone call posted on his website, was clearly thunderstruck by the fact that the booth actually existed, and vowed to visit some day.

Daniels made his first trip to the site in late August 1997, after receiving a Xeroxed map of the area from Dennis Casebier. He got lost, presaging the experience of hundreds who would follow in his tire tracks, and arrived after dark. Still, the booth inspired him:

"It was just as I had imagined it--a lonely communications outpost at the end of a long, long chain of telephone poles. All its glass had been shot out, but I thought it was beautiful. At that moment I felt I might never leave it." [238]

The story of the booth spread rapidly, posted by Daniels on his website and popularized through contacts in the counterculture art world. When he first made a trip to the booth, no one called - Daniels paged a friend so he could hear what an incoming ring sounded like. Most of the commentors on his website were friends from the art world or people who happened across the site accidentally. A series of radio appearances and small news articles, starting as early as 1998 and increased in frequency by April 1999, drew more visitors to Daniels' webpage. The overall tone was still friendly. One writer detailed her plans for an Easter weekend campout, and Daniels replied that he would try to show up. [239] Phone traffic could be heavy if a trip to the booth was publicized in advance. Camping overnight at the booth on his way to the 1998 Burning Man festival, the phone rang almost constantly, enough so that Daniels had to take the receiver off the hook to get some sleep. [240]

Media attention began to spread the word about the funky telephone booth in the middle of nowhere. A visitor in early July 1999 logged three calls in an hour and a half, more than typical but hardly a portent of things to come. [241] As news of the booth spread, the number of visitors to the area also increased. The new enthusiasts came from all walks of life, but they all had the phone booth in common. Andria Fiegel Wolfe, an interior designer from New York, flew cross-country with her sister to answer calls at the booth in their birthday suits. Two southern California men, who had only met online, took a roadtrip to the booth to hang up the receiver when they received constant busy signals. An Arizona man, Rick Karr, acting on orders from the Holy Spirit, spent more than a month camped beside the booth in the middle of summer in 1999. Karr read scripture to astonished callers and documented every one in a logbook, recording over 500 calls. Mike Sims and Ron Kling set up a party at the booth, complete with food and a punk band, to promote their website. [242]

The story of the "loneliest phone booth in the world" was picked up by major news outlets after mid-1999, and the added publicity proved fatal to the booth. Flash News Service first told of the new phenomenon, and the story was subsequently investigated by the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the San Bernardino Sun, and the Las Vegas Review-Journal, among others. When news of the booth, along with maps and directions, appeared in major papers serving populations within driving distance of the location, the increase in visitors to the site was enormous. The Los Angeles Times reported Daniels' plans for a Y2K celebration at the booth, and the deluge of self-invitations from people who wanted to be part of the action convinced Daniels to stay away. Dozens of TV crews, including major nationwide networks, made the trip to the Mojave. The phone would hardly be placed in the cradle before it would ring again. Even David Letterman did a spoof, documenting "the mic stand in the middle of nowhere." [243] Those people who had learned of the booth's existence before the media blitz lamented its newfound popularity. One wistful post noted that "Something kinda dies after Brokaw gets ahold of it...know what I mean?" [244]

Many of the residents of the area did not mind the popularity. Charlie Wilcox, a local with a tow truck, made money from ill-prepared booth visitors who ignored warnings not to take two-wheel drive cars on the sandy roads. However, one nearby rancher, Tim Overson, was not happy with the booth or the unusual people who gravitated to it. His frustration was due in part to the fact that the best road to the phone ran literally right through his front yard, and when people got stuck, they often knocked on his door. Mary Martin noted Overson's method of occasional revenge: "although he won't admit it - he'd go on out and cut the wire." [245]

Nothing prepared Mojave management for the popularity of a lonely phone booth. Pacific Bell's right-of-way for the phone booth expired in 1992, and the company hadn't bothered to renew it. The line wasn't very profitable, and much of the need for the cross-desert telephone link had been eliminated when a microwave tower was installed further south, leaving the Mojave Phone Booth at the end of a long line of poles.

With the increased notoriety of the booth and the extensive activity at the site, the NPS grew ill at ease. In early May, park staff happened upon a campfire at the booth, blazing away unattended. This was the final straw: Park Service officials "had a chat" with Pac-Bell and encouraged the phone company to remove the booth. Without notice, Pacific Bell hauled the booth away on May 17, 2000, leaving the counterculture in mourning and the press writing requiems for the "loneliest phone booth on Earth." [246]

The Park Service was deluged with emails, phone calls, and letters from outraged supporters of the telephone booth. Daniels posted Superintendent Martin's park phone number and email address on his website, and exhorted booth supporters to call: "Do it. Do it. Do it till you're satisfied." [247] Many pro-booth correspondents pointed out the appearance of hypocrisy: "[I]sn't this a form of recreation? I thought our system of National Parks was for recreational use?" [248] Almost all protested NPS claims of environmental damage in the area. Some took issue with other parts of the boilerplate NPS reply, which charged booth visitors with bringing decorative white quartz rock to the site and interpreted a note that one user left at the booth reminding visitors to the keep the area clean as evidence of the volume of trash left behind by visitors. [249] Others were threats, including one bomb threat that sounded serious enough to prompt the Park Service to call the Federal Bureau of Investigation. [250] Many supporters attempted to verbalize their affections for the booth: "It had SOMETHING...something about it was almost mysterious." [251] "Folks...had a possibility to get out for a while from their every day life..." [252] "I'll probably be mourning its death on and off for the rest of my life." [253] The rhetoric of loss, while exaggerated, seemingly reflects a real depth of feeling about the phone booth. The NPS did receive a small number of letters in support of its action, from the National Parks Conservation Association and other individuals who resented the booth as a man-made intrusion inconsistent with the features that were supposed to exist in national parks. [254]

The furor took a considerable time to die down. Almost two years after the booth's removal, the superintendent continued to receive several booth-related emails a week. The incident and the subsequent reaction after the booth was removed illustrate the difficulties posed to the Park Service by the history of the eastern Mojave as a working landscape. When applied to a place that had long been managed for multiple uses, the NPS mission of preservation and protection can seem unduly restrictive to users wishing little resistance to their exercise of unlimited freedom in the form of worshiping a quirky phone booth on public lands.

moja/adhi/adhi6.htm
Last Updated: 05-Apr-2004

Requiem for a Telephone Booth

The Internet helped turn a lone phone booth in the Mojave desert into a cult phenomenon--until the bureaucrats stepped in.

The legendary Mojave phone booth, in the middle of California's Mojave desert, miles from anywhere. (Reddit)

RENEE TAWA
Los Angeles Times

"You think maybe some phreaks stole it?"--disbelieving fan on a Web site devoted to the uprooted Mojave Phone Booth.

The endless elegy to the Mojave Phone Booth is loving and wild, as passionate as the callers who rung it up at all hours and usually got an answer, as giddy as the two naked young women who recently answered calls there.

Earlier this month, the most famous phone booth this side of Clark Kent was yanked from its remote spot in the Mojave National Preserve, 75 miles from the Nevada border. Fans from all over the world called the booth or picked up its ringing phone, drawn by what was billed as "the loneliest phone booth on Earth."

What happened on that stretch of desert is a metaphor for today's wired times, a weird merging of old and new communication. Promoted by the Internet, media and word-of-mouth, the phone booth symbolized an intimate, makeshift community of sorts--until it turned into a roadside attraction among the Joshua trees. The pay phone was done in by the very fans who sought the quirky potential of a connection to the middle of nowhere. It became such a symbol that one fan had planned to get married at the site. (He met his fiancee there.) And a USC graduate student in visual anthropology is producing a documentary on the Mojave phenomenon.

The booth was installed in the 1960s for miners, and no one paid much attention to it until recently, when a computer entrepreneur, Godfrey Daniels, plugged the phone on his Web site, http://www.deuceofclubs.com/moj/mojave.html.

"All its glass had been shot out," he wrote, "but I thought it was beautiful." He posted photos and a satellite image of the pay phone, and a star was born.

In the last three years or so, fans who traveled to the booth, on a winding dirt road accessible only by four-wheel drive, reported answering more than 200 calls a day.

No one knew what was to come.

On May 17, with no notice, workers removed the booth. The number has been disconnected.

Pacific Bell and National Park Service officials cited safety concerns, saying that "increased public traffic had a negative impact on the desert environment in the nation's newest national park."

Pacific Bell spokesman Steve Getzug said he did not know who initiated discussions about hauling away the phone booth. He said it was a joint decision.

"I know there were several conversations between Pacific Bell and the National Park Service," he said. "It was really weighing this issue of public needs and impacts they saw happening out in the desert. I think they were concerned with campfires and litter, and had concerns about people coming out there and getting stranded."

*

A spokesman for the Mojave National Preserve, Mike Reynolds, said park staff members have come across "a ton of trash in the area" and stranded motorists who try to get to the phone booth without four-wheel drive. One windy day, near the booth, with no one around, "there was a blazing campfire pit. It was going crazy.

"Congress has set aside these lands to be preserved, protected and enjoyed by all citizens," he said.

Fans of the phone booth challenged the officials' statements, saying that they took care to pick up trash. Regulars at the site said that they did not notice abandoned campfires and that locals helped out stuck motorists.

In fact, said Kaarina Roberto, a USC graduate student, people took pride in the spot. Roberto, 28, was skeptical when she first started investigating the site as the possible subject of a thesis for her visual anthropology major. Then she and her husband began camping there, answering the phone as it rang all night.

"When we first heard people say they cared about it, it sounded kind of weird," she said. "But it's caring about what it represents . . . it represents the positive aspects of humanity, a diverse group of people who share some common ground, a shared humanity."

She was stunned by the news of its removal.

"It sounds really preposterous," she said, "but it felt almost like a death of a community that has formed, unlike anything else you've ever experienced."

Andria Fiegel Wolfe, a 30-year-old theatrical lighting designer, and her sister visited the booth last year from New York City. The phone was ringing as they pulled up in their rental car. In the heat of the desert, they shed their clothes and answered the phone with sun block and a smile: "Mojave Desert. How may I direct your call?" In 4 1/2 hours, they took 72 calls.

Because?

"I think it's a little bit of magic, something special," Wolfe said in an e-mail. "'I think that people also appreciated the frivolity of it all, the whimsy of the trips out to the Booth. . . .

"Me, I was inspired to go see the desert for myself. And it changed my life. If it took a silly telephone booth to give me that, I'm thankful and can't question it too much. I'm sad beyond words that it's gone, but it's a sadness over the circumstances of its removal--that the park isn't truly for the people, if that's the way the rangers see it."

Daniels, who plans to keep his Web site up, still hoped that the booth could live on, to tie the knot in front of it.

"I want to get the booth. I want to reinstall it somewhere else. I won't disclose the location, but you'll be able to call the number."

The booth, according to Pacific Bell, will be destroyed.

That's standard procedure, a spokesman said, for a damaged phone booth that cannot be revived.

If a Phone Rings in the Desert...

Leander Kahney
http://www.wired.com/

What happens when a tourist attraction, in this case a phone booth in the middle of nowhere, becomes too popular? The National Park Service removes everything but the ring, that's what.

Located smack in the middle of the Mojave Desert at the end of a dirt road, the Mojave Phone Booth attracted so many visitors to an environmentally sensitive area that the NPS cut the connection and removed the booth last week.

"While the phone and its location proved to be a novelty for some in recent months, the increased public traffic had a negative impact on the desert environment in the nation's newest national park," said the National Park Service and Pacific Bell in a joint statement announcing its removal.

At least 15 miles from the nearest paved road, which runs through the vast nowhere between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, the phone was installed decades ago for workers at a now closed cinder mine.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, except rocks and Joshua trees, can be seen from the booth, according to Godfrey Daniels, an Arizona computer consultant who popularized the outpost.

Three years ago, after a friend told Daniels about the phone, he began dialing it every day, hoping for an answer.

Daniels documented his obsession -- A Pointless Exercise in Telephony -- and the sheer weirdness of it persuaded people from all over the planet to call the booth's number (760-733-9969).

"You can be sitting bored out of your mind at work and it’s like traveling," said Daniels of the attraction the phone exerted. "You can make something happen far away."

For the longest time, the phone attracted only a trickle of visitors. Then came a rash of news stories in the national media, and curiosity seekers flooded the site.

"There were a lot of visitors," Daniels said, "Well, for out there, there were a lot of visitors. Mainly at weekends. The chances of someone answering the phone were significantly improved from in the past."

Now Daniels said he is in two minds about the booth's removal. While its popularity now bores him, he remains skeptical of the National Parks Service rationale for its removal.

"I don’t think the NPS had a right to remove it," he said. "They can’t say what the negative environmental impact is. If there was a negative environmental impact, they should be able to say what it is."

The spokesperson for the Mojave National Preserve, which oversees the park, forwarded requests for comment on the booth situation to Pacific Bell, which didn't return phone calls. Neither did the the NPS.

The official joint statement simply states: "After weighing environmental concerns and public need, Pacific Bell and the National Park Service agreed to remove a pay phone located in a remote pocket of the Mojave National Preserve."

Whatever the reason, fans of the booth aren't buying it. Daniels estimated he has received nearly 200 emails protesting its removal in the last few days. Many came from visitors claiming the land around the booth remains unblemished despite the increased traffic.

"I was very impressed at how clean and untarnished the area was for being so popular," wrote "Robin," who visited last month. "There was no trash or debris, no trampled plants, no broken glass.... It looks to me like the people who have taken the time to visit the booth were very aware of keeping things in order."

Pacific Bell was a reluctant party in the booth’s removal, Daniels said, because of all the publicity it had received. The company had even replaced some of the shot-out windows with ones displaying the company’s logo.

And now, although the phone's gone, the number still rings, which Daniels said is a particularly cruel trick because unsuspecting callers believe the phone is still there.

Daniels said he hopes Pacific Bell will sell him the booth. If that happens, he plans to install the booth in a very remote, secret location and install a telecom link-up. He declined to discuss the details.

"If I had to do this all over again, I would do it very differently," he said. "I would keep it very, very quiet."

Phone booth in desert disappears

Mojave visitors can no longer phone home from a once famous communication site.

By Keith Rogers
Las Vegas Review-Journal

The number for the lonely pay phone in the Mojave Desert still rings, but the booth that once caught the attention of curiosity seekers around the world is gone.

Pacific Bell technicians with the concurrence of the National Park Service removed the famous phone booth last week from its remote location in the Mojave National Preserve in California, 75 miles southwest of the Nevada border. That's where it had stood since the 1960s to serve the nearby Cima Cinder Mine and wanderers out that way.

Pacific Bell and National Park Service officials said the phone booth had become so well-known from media exposure and Web sites that chronicled its existence that travelers were damaging fragile desert resources. And that outweighed its public service needs, they said.

"Certainly the phone and its location proved to be a novelty for some in recent months but that all had an impact," explained Steve Getzug, a Pacific Bell spokesman in Los Angeles.

He confirmed the booth was removed Wednesday and said it was hauled to a company service yard in Southern California.

Calls to the booth's number, (760) 733-9969, rang endlessly Monday, but one Web site that posts information about the so-called Mojave Phone Booth, claims dialers were hearing a "phantom ring."

Removal of the booth "was probably inevitable given the hyper-attention the booth attracted (and) federal involvement," according to the Web site known as "Deuce of Clubs."

Mojave National Preserve Superintendent Mary Martin said problems with travelers in search of the phone booth had increased in recent months.

"We had a fire out there a couple weeks ago from a blazing campfire," she said, noting that decorative rocks had been used to spell messages near the booth and vandalism was commonplace.

Ranchers in the area also complained that sightseers were pestering them to find the booth and some became stranded and sought their help.

"We've had a lot of cars that have gone out there and been stuck," Martin said.

Getzug said callers to the number will probably hear endless ringing for a few more days but once the disconnect order is processed there will be a message that the number is no longer in service. Plans call for removing the telephone lines that led to the booth.

Pacific Bell's right of way for the booth and transmission lines expired in 1992.

"It was sort of out of sight and out of mind for a number of years," Getzug said.

KMUD’s Pirate Radio Adventures at the Mojave Phone Booth

janggolan weblog

The Mojave Phone Booth was a phone booth in a remote region of the Mojave National Preserve that rang almost 24 hours a day 7 days a week. People from all over the planet called the most remote phone booth known on earth with the hope that someone would answer. Installed shortly after World War 2 at the request of local miners, the phone booth was miles from civilization, 15 miles from the nearest highway, near Death Valley.

For more than fifty years it was the most curious landmark in a wild and desolate area until it was removed by park officials in May 2000.

On March 20, 2000 an adventurous and enthusiastic crew from shortwave pirate station KMUD descended on the Mojave Phone Booth for a historic broadcast from the site. The phone booth had been recently publicized in the media including the nationally syndicated Art Bell show. One of the KMUD operators that night called the Art Bell show from the booth and spoke with guest host Peter Weissbach. KMUD was allowed to give the time and frequency of their broadcast but not the phone number (which was 760-733-9969). However, the phone number was easily available on the internet, setting the stage for a live call-in show transmitted by KMUD on 6851 and 3450 kHz.

KMUD crew members spent three days and two nights in the Mojave National Preserve and recall the weekend as being perfect for their activities. Careful planning had gone into the technical arrangements. Antennas were set up and transmitters finely tuned. Batteries were charged and ready to go. An audio pickup and mixer were connected to the phone. Wires and cables were strung everywhere, turning the booth into a scene from an electrician’s repair shop.

Everything seemed to work like a charm. No park rangers visited the phone booth that weekend and thankfully no one from the Federal Communications Commission. After half an hour of testing, KMUD signed on with Art Bell’s “The Chase” theme. The signal went out in AM mode with about 20 watts of carrier power. A CD of wolf calls played atmospherically in the background as the KMUD crew interviewed callers on the air. The effect worked beautifully – no one seemed to notice that coyotes, not wolves, are indigenous to the desert.

KMUD’s broadcast featured conversations with callers, some music and station IDs, and the announcers encouraging listeners to call the phone booth. An interesting woman caller suggested that the Mojave Phone Booth was drawing its power from a UFO held at “Area 51” in Nevada. Two callers reported on reception conditions. Two reporters from Canadian Television arrived at the phone booth just prior to the KMUD transmission. They interviewed the KMUD crew before the show and videotaped them fielding phone calls. This must have been a first – shortwave radio pirates broadcasting live being interviewed by television journalists.

One woman who called during the weekend was an official with a Zurich based financial institution. She called from St. Moritz where she was facilitating a seminar for corporate CEOs. Several weeks earlier the woman had been touring the desert and happened upon the phone booth. She answered some calls and learned all about the booth’s story. After returning to Switzerland she decided to call the booth herself.

The KMUD broadcast from the Mojave Phone Booth was well documented in audio and video. It is unclear how many people actually heard the broadcast but those who did were witnesses to pirate radio history. The beautiful, stark Mojave environment was a natural setting for people connecting with other people, their voices shimmering through the phone lines and the ether, the power of radio bringing them all together.

The Mojave Phone Booth

How a windswept, bullet hole-ridden telephone became a legend in its own time.

By J.A. Getzlaff
Daily Planet on salon.com

Jan. 12, 2000 Somewhere in the middle of the Mojave National Reserve is a phone booth. Thanks to Internet cowboy Godfrey Daniels, the windswept, bullet hole-ridden booth, once used solely by ranchers and miners, is now famous.

The story goes like this: Daniels, a computer programmer by day and hopeless romantic by night, heard about a working phone booth sitting in the midst of scorched scrub about 12 miles off of Interstate 15 and 75 miles southwest of Las Vegas. Curious, he set out to find the booth, and not only did he find it -- he fell in love with it.

Daniels rode home and created a Web site, cleverly titled The Mojave Phone Booth Site.

His labor of love paid off, and soon digital surfers from far and wide were calling the phone -- and in some cases, peeling their butts from their chairs to actually visit The Booth to answer its incoming calls.

To date, calls have been made by South Africans and answered by New Yorkers. At all hours of the day and night, the phone rings.

But not everybody has been happy about it. According to Daniels' site, one killjoy stole the phone's receiver, and now park rangers are confiscating the quartz stones that have been used to write out the booth's phone number for aerial viewers.

Yet the Mojave Phone Booth prevails -- it remains up and running, lovingly decorated with big-busted Mattel toys and photographs of itself, and inspiring television commercials, a short story and even an indie film, "Dead Line."

Desert silence broken by 'rrrrring'

Charlie Wilcox waits to answer calls from people all over the world

From www.cnn.com

BAKER, California (CNN) -- Fourteen miles from the nearest town, the silence of the vast Mojave Desert is broken -- by the ringing coming from a phone booth.

The booth sits beside a narrow road, surrounded by nothing but cacti and high brush.

"You see people coming from all over to see that telephone booth," said Tammy Seeward, who works at a gas station in the nearest community, Baker, "It's out in the middle of nowhere. And it works."

At one time -- back in the 1960s -- it had a purpose.

"We got two mines and ranchers. They needed something in between," said Charlie Wilcox, the self-anointed answerer of the Mojave phone.

Wilcox points out that, while the miners and ranchers have dwindled, the phone has been ringing off the hook, thanks to an Arizona man who put the desert phone number on the Internet.

So who would call and expect to get an answer? Wilcox said the calls come from all over -- as far away as Germany, France and Italy.

And, he says, the calls keep on coming -- with no sign of letting up.

CNN affiliate KNSD contributed to this report.

Reaching Way Out

By JOHN M. GLIONNA, TIMES STAFF WRITER
Los Angeles Times

Lonesome Phone

In the middle of the desert stands a phone waiting for a caller, any caller. Someone might answer. More often, no one will. But interest in the solitary booth has spread worldwide via the Internet, where several Web sites pay tribute to the lonely phone.

MOJAVE NATIONAL PRESERVE — With only the lazy Joshua trees and hovering buzzards out here to bear witness, this isolated expanse of high-desert plain could well be among the quietest places on the planet.

By day, the summer heat hammers hard and the dull whistle of the wind is the only discernible noise. Come nightfall, the eerie silence is often pierced by the woeful bleat of a wandering burro.

But wait. There's another sound.

Along a line of wooden power poles running to the horizon in both directions, 14 miles from the nearest paved road, a solitary pay phone beckons with the shrill sound of impatient civilization.

Then it rings again. And again. And yet again, often dozens of times a day.

The callers? A bored housewife from New Zealand. A German high school student. An on-the-job Seattle stockbroker. A long-distance trucker who dials in from the road. There's a proud skunk owner from Atlanta, a pizza deliveryman from San Bernardino and a bill collector from Denver given a bum steer while tracing a debt.

Receivers in hand, they're reaching out--at all hours of the day and night, from nearly every continent on the globe--to make contact with this forlorn desert outpost.

They're calling the Mojave Phone Booth.

Here comes a curious caller now:

"Hello? Hello? Is this the Mojave Phone Booth?" asks Pher Reinman, an unemployed South Carolina computer worker.

Told by a reporter answering the line that he has indeed reached what cult followers call the loneliest phone booth on Earth, he exclaims: "Oh my God, I can't believe it! Somebody answered! There's actually somebody out there!"

Calling to See What Happens

Like Reinman, callers everywhere are connecting with the innocuous little booth located not far from the California-Nevada border, along a winding and treacherous dirt road accessible only by four-wheel-drive vehicle.

Out here, where summer temperatures soar to 115 degrees and cattle often wander by en route to a nearby watering hole, there's rarely anyone on hand to answer the calls, but persistent phoners don't seem to care. If someone does pick up, of course, so much the better.

Some of those who do answer are previous callers who, for unknowable reasons that make sense only to them, also feel compelled to visit the booth.

"For us," wrote screenwriter Chuck Atkins of his recent trek to the booth, "it was about driving into nowhere for no good reason, meeting fellow netizens who shared our sense of childish glee at the coolness of a phone booth in the middle of nowhere."

Indeed, this public phone, first installed in the 1960s and operated with a hand crank by nearby volcanic cinder miners and other desert denizens, has been popularized by the globe's most advanced communications system: the Internet.

The craze began two years ago after a high-desert wanderer noticed a telephone icon on a Mojave road map. Curious, he drove out from Los Angeles to investigate and wrote a letter to a counterculture magazine describing his exploits and including the phone number. After spotting the letter, computer entrepreneur Godfrey Daniels became so captivated by the idea he created the first of several Web sites dedicated solely to the battered booth.

Since then, word of the phone has been beamed to computers virtually everywhere.

It has evolved into a worldwide listening post straight from the mind of a Rod Serling or a David Lynch, captivating countless callers.

There's Preston Lunn of San Bernardino, whose wife reluctantly let him take a long-distance shot at reaching someone at the phone, a call he made "just for the hell of it, just to see what happens."

There's Debbie, the 20-year-old baby-sitter from Boston whose older sister, "the one who goes to college," told her about the phone. Bored, with her infant wards asleep, Debbie decided to take a chance and telephone the desert.

"So, what's out there?" she asked tentatively. "Just, like, cactuses and a dirt road and stuff?"

And there's Atlantan Jim Shanton, who heard about the phone "from one of the ladies on our pet skunk e-mail list." Added Shanton: "And I was just crazy enough to call. For me, this is like calling Mars. It's that far away from everything I know."

'If You Call It, They Will Come'

What callers reach is just a shell of a phone booth, actually--its windows long ago blasted out by desert gunslingers desperate for something to shoot at, its coin box deactivated so that only incoming calls and outgoing credit card calls are possible.

But fans have taken the neglected old booth under their wing. Outside, they've posted a sign that reads "Mojave Phone Booth--you could shoot it, but why would you want to?" Next to that is another placard reading: "If you call it, they will come."

On top of the pay phone perches a nude Barbie doll. Scratched into the booth's metal frame are its longitude and latitude coordinates. Inside, along with plastic-coated children's magnets spelling out "Mojave Phone Booth," are mementos such as candles and license plates. Visitors have covered the booth's bullet holes with Band-Aids.

Nearby, fist-sized stones form the phone's number along with a huge arrow pointing to the booth. The message can be seen from the air so, as one Mojave phone fan put it, "even aliens can find it."

The booth-oriented Web sites multiplied when their creators saw the phone on other sites and--after calling numerous times--decided to document their own pilgrimages to the desert phone.

There's the lighting designer from New York who was so thrilled to finally reach the Mojave phone that she stripped naked "and ran around like a giddy little girl."

And two L.A. writers, who later chronicled their trek to the Mojave, headed out just to return the receiver to its cradle after learning the phone was off the hook. They arrived to find the phone temporarily out of order.

Rick Karr, a 51-year-old spiritual wanderer, has no Web site, but says he was instructed by the Holy Spirit to travel to the desert and answer the phone. The Texas native recently spent 32 days camping out at the booth, fielding more than 500 calls from people like Bubba in Phoenix and Ian in Newfoundland and repeated contacts from a caller who identified himself as "Sgt. Zeno from the Pentagon."

"This phone," he said with a weary sigh, "never stops ringing."

While she would not provide statistics, a Pacific Bell spokeswoman said the phone experienced "very low outgoing usage."

Still, the booth is sometimes used by locals to conduct business or check messages.

"I've passed that old phone booth just about every day for more than 20 years now and I've never given it as much as a second thought," said Charlie Wilcox, a sun-wrinkled 63-year-old tow-truck driver who has become the booth's unofficial tour guide. "And I'll be damned. Now it's a celebrity."

Phone booth callers, Web site creators and Internet intellectuals alike are trying to figure out just why this far-flung phone has gripped the imagination of those who come across it.

Some say calls to the booth are an attempt to create community in a disconnected world. Others view the calls as pure phone fetish, a sort of long-distance voyeurism.

The Attraction of Exotic Isolation

"It's the kick of reaching out and touching a perfect stranger in a completely anonymous and indiscriminate way," said Mark Thomas, a New York City concert pianist who created a Web site listing the numbers of thousands of public pay phones worldwide, including the Mojave Desert phone.

Many of the phones on his list are located in urban areas--such as the one at the top observation deck of the Eiffel Tower--and Thomas said the Mojave Phone Booth may attract so many callers because of its exotic isolation.

"You could make a chance contact at any pay phone, but the odds of reaching someone out in the desert are incredibly remote," he said. "That's why people call."

Others say calls to the phone are made out of sheer boredom.

"It's the get-a-life factor," said UCLA sociologist Warren TenHouten. "Some people just have nothing to do, so they pursue shreds of information that have no value. It amuses me, but there's something pitiful about it too. I mean, what's the most interesting thing that could happen by being so mischievous as to call a public pay phone?

"Someone answers, a person you have absolutely no connection with. You exchange names and talk about the weather. What a thrill."

One of the 60 callers greeted by a reporter on a recent visit acknowledged that he was shocked anyone was there to answer.

"I thought I'd just call and wake up the coyotes," said a purchasing agent from San Bernardino County, who buzzed the phone from work. "Modern times are passing us by and it's just sort of romantic--just the idea that it's out there."

Daniels, a Tempe, Ariz., resident, is considered the father of the phone booth. He was hooked in the spring of 1997, after reading of the Mojave phone in the cryptic letter to the magazine "Wig Out."

The 36-year-old, who once ran for the Arizona Legislature and tried to start a country called Oceania, had discovered a new adventure: He began calling the booth every day. And he forced friends to call whenever they visited him.

After weeks of long-distance dialing, someone picked up.

"I was probably more surprised than he was that we were having a conversation on that phone," said Lorene Caffee, a local miner who answered the Mojave line in 1997.

Daniels transcribed the conversation on his new Web site. Later, after making several trips to the phone, he included such features as a 360-degree view of the surrounding desert from atop the phone and pictures of a bust of composer Richard Wagner--which he carries with him on his travels--inside the booth.

Soon came the call blitz. On one two-day trip to the booth, Daniels answered 200 of them, including a confused connection from Albania during the war in Kosovo.

Daniels plans to return on New Year's Eve to take Y2K reports from around the globe.

"I like the fact that you can have people who have never met or never will meet and they have this little intersection," he said. "Two people who have no business talking to one another."

Surprised to Get an Answer

Since most callers don't expect an answer, they gasp when a visitor actually picks up, many quickly hanging up like teenage telephone pranksters.

One call answered by a reporter came from 17-year-old Jan Spuehamer of Hamburg, Germany. "This is costing me a lot of money, but I think it is very funny," Spuehamer said. "One magazine article said you have to be very lucky to have someone pick up this line. Because this is the loneliest phone in the world, no?"

And so people keep calling the Mojave Phone Booth. And visiting.

On a drive home from Las Vegas, Wade Burrows and Brian Burkland impulsively decided to visit the booth. They walked around for 10 minutes scratching their heads, finally leaving behind their own memento: a car license plate they both autographed.

Said the 21-year-old Burkland: "Dude, this is, like, so cool!"

Then Burrows, a San Bernardino pizza deliveryman, placed a call from his favorite desert phone booth.

"Hey, Mom," he said, holding a cigarette burned down to the filter. "You'll never guess where I'm calling from--a phone booth in the middle of nowhere."

He paused, listening.

"Why am I out here? Well, Mom, that's a long story."