Why are Western Electric phones so expensive on ebay and elsewhere, at least $35 up to 50. I thought there were 50 to 100 million of the standard black phones made, just counting the last design of the handset, which is almost a rectangle in cross section. Where did they all go?
Does that include shipping, which could be $15? If so, sounds about right, if not, then I guess they could be a little high. Seller has to find them, test them, package them, pay the Ebay fees, pay income tax on the earnings.
I should have added that sellers also have to deal with crazy customers where they have to take it back and eat the shipping both ways because the buyer claims the green phone they bought is more of a chartreuse or they claim it doesn't work, etc. And customers with legitimate returns too. Those problems are higher with used items like this.
The dump.
There is at least one in pretty much every antique store in the US.
I have three model 500 and one model 300, all working; one in active use.
Interesting factoid - to determine the manufacturing data of a WE 500 deskset, unscrew the earpiece - the date will be marked on the back of the speaker.
Not entirely... often the earpieces of older sets would be reused in newer ones.
The girls have picked them, every one Oh, when will you ever learn?
(Sorry, I couldn't resist!)
Sure enough. June 13, 1984. Practically new. (This is the AT&T handset that looks just like the WE ones.)
Almost ready for installation but I have to find some sort of on/off switch that I can put at the end of a wire. There's a hamfest this Sunday. if that doesn't work, I'll hire guides and go the dresser in the basement.
That's a real shame. I would have stored them in my spare bedroom, in case of national emergency
Trader makes some good points in his reply, but I would still be annoyed that I had to pay so much....However, I went to look in my stash of phones and phone parts and I had things I'd forgotten about. I can't find the Western Electric handset I was looking for, G-1, I think it's called, but I found two AT&T handsets. One of them looks just like the WEs do. Do you know why it was relabeled AT&T? The other is more modern and less yellowed, but even if it is whiter at the ear- and mouth-pieces where they were protected from sunlight by sitting in the cradle.
If I use my office phone/phone machine, my friend often can't hear me well on the speakerphone, and I can't hear her well on the handset. Sometimes I have to keep turning the speakerphone off and on like a mike on a shortwave radio. So I wanted a handset to plug in beside the phone.
If you rewire it, so the mike and speaker are in series, and connected to the red and green from the wall, you don't need the rest of the phone. You can't dial, so it's only for incoming calls or calls in progress. Before I switched to this phone and 3 cordless extensions, I had a corded handset in the bathroom, with a toggle switch to answer it, a beeper to tell if it was ringing, a switch to turn off the beeper if I wanted quiet, and a neon light to tell if it was ringing when the beeper was off. I was looking for that handset, but one of these will do I guess.
I thought I rewired the handset itself, but the ends of each wire go into the jack, so I must have done the rearranging in the wall, or in this case the thing that normally mounts on the baseboard of a house.
When I was in NYC and not working, a friend called me one day, that he had found on the sidewalk near Wall St. a big beautiful wood desk like executives have and did I want it. Sure. By the time I got there, about
30 minutes later, someone had taken the drawer handles and the glass top had gotten broken, but the desk we put in the back seat of my convertible and I've had it ever since. It has on the side one of those 2" square cream colord terminal blocks for the phone, and a thing also 2" square with a push button to call my secretary. I keep pushing it and she never comes. I think I need a new one.There was a store in NYC called Just Knobs, and that's where I got replacement door pulls. They truly only sold knobs, but they had a whole store full.
You know, the desk is so big I can barely reach the button. I would have put it in the "chair well"?, next to my knee, instead. I think I'll have my secretary call someone to move it.
The bell system was broken up in 1982.
My parents used to listen to that song a lot. I thought the last line was "Oh, when will they ever learn?".
Yes, it was, but they're not here and anyhow I think Retired thinks that I'm the one who sould have learned by now. And he's right.
Unless my web source was wrong, "when will you ever learn" is the last line of the first verse and "when will they ever learn" is the last line of the last verse. So, I suspect that we're both correct.
A number of people have covered the song so you probably can find any combination of pronouns. Baez does the longer version with 'they' in every verse but doesn't repeat the first verse in at least one recording.
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