BY KYLE LOVERN

Phone booths used to be everywhere, but you don’t see them these days.

I guess the younger generation wouldn’t even know what one was if they saw it. Heck, they would not even know how to use a rotary-style telephone inside an older booth.

The first public coin-operated pay phone appeared in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1889. The first phone booth debuted in the early 1900s.

The 1970s brought those semi-enclosed pay phones, which for most of us, lacked the charm of the older booths. Superman couldn’t even use those to change from Clark Kent into his blue and red superhero tights and cape.

In the 1990s, there were nearly 3 million pay phones in America. Those have dwindled down and now you would be lucky to find one.

The iconic phone booths used to be everywhere. They were outside grocery stores, gas stations, restaurants and even inside some buildings – like a hotel lobby.

They were at train stations, bus stations, hospitals and government buildings, such as courthouses.

Now they are like the many other fond memories of our past – almost extinct.

A big city like New York or Chicago had thousands of phone booths. If a family had a phone booth near their house or apartment, they didn’t have a phone in the home; they just trotted down the street to use the pay phone.

I can remember a couple of glass phone booths across the street from the Williamson Fieldhouse. If you needed to call home after practice or a game, you could put in your dime, dial the number and make the phone call.

I recall a phone booth beside the gas station at Nolan where I grew up. There was one outside of Falls Branch Market near Chattaroy where my family shopped many times in the 1960s and 70s. If you were driving down any road, eventually you would see a phone booth. So if you needed to contact someone, you pulled over and entered the small cubicle, dropped in your coin and made the call. If you didn’t know the number, there was usually a phone book in the booth attached to a small chain.

There are the beautiful wooden indoor phone booths that are considered antiques these days. If you have one of these, it is worth a lot of money.

Pay telephones eventually became so profoundly ingrained in American life. Even the government catered to them. When the U.S. Treasury changed the composition of coins, they checked with the telephone company to make sure the coins were compatible with pay phones located in telephone booths.

Phone booths have been used in many movies throughout the years. They were an iconic part of America’s countryside and city streets, and they were almost everywhere.

With the evolution of the cellphone, the need for phone booths disappeared. The emergence of cell and car phones made it even harder to justify the upkeep of pay phones and telephone booths for Bell Telephone and other companies. Thirty years or so ago, they slowly started fading away. I can’t recall the last time I saw one.

I guess I’m just a sentimental guy. I miss things like phone booths, drive-in restaurants, old movie theaters, general stores and many things from our past.

Like the phone booth, these are just fond memories for many of us.

(Kyle Lovern is a longtime journalist in the Tug Valley. He is now a retired freelance writer and columnist for the Mountain Citizen.)