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Small California Town Hung Up On Its Lone Pay Phone

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By CAROL POGASH, The New York Times

Published: September 7, 2007

CANYON, Calif. - As sunlight poked through the redwoods and a fiddler played 18th-century Scottish tunes, residents gathered recently for the Canyon Payphone Jubilee, a celebration that could occur, perhaps, only in this isolated, independent community on the eastern face of the Oakland hills.

The focus of all the attention was Canyon's only pay phone, on the front porch of the post office.

'Can you imagine a phone being such a big deal?' the county supervisor, Gayle Uilkema, asked. 'But it really is.'

One twisting road leads into, and out of, Canyon, an unincorporated area of Contra Costa County where 220 residents strongly prefer living close to nature, without many of modern civilization's creature comforts.

On weekends, the community, with its wooded, mountainous terrain, attracts hundreds of bicycle riders and other visitors, many of whom wait by the pay phone hoping the locals will help them with directions.

'In theory, houses have street names and numbers,' said the fiddler, Jonathan Goodwin, who makes a living fixing clocks.

In practice, though, Canyon residents bestow their own addresses on their dwellings, like 2001 Boulevard of the Stars and 212 Fuzzy Frog Ravine.

With cell phone reception rare, Canyon residents consider their pay phone to be as essential as the one-room post office and the three-room schoolhouse.

Last year, however, AT&T decided that the phone, like countless others across the country, was not making enough money, and dispatched a worker to dismantle it.

He ran smack into Elena Tyrrell, Canyon's second-generation postmistress, who persuaded him to spare his target, at least temporarily.

Tyrrell has experience challenging authority. Despite U.S. Postal Service rules, her mutt, Joe, accompanies her to work. After a service inspection team advised her that all documents had to be behind glass and pulled baby pictures and postcards from the wall, she put them back up.

The inspectors did not like the old-fashioned clock either: Patrons should not know how long they had been waiting.

Because there is never a line, however, Tyrrell put it back on the wall, she said.

Tyrrell persuaded AT&T to leave the phone in place for three months, which gave her time to collect statements from the local police, fire department and park district attesting to its vital function and asking the company to reconsider.

On Dec. 31, the company carted away the phone.

Canyon's residents, led by Tyrrell and Goodwin, were determined to get it back.

'We were all insulted,' Goodwin said, 'and indignance translates into action.'

He called the California Public Utilities Commission and learned that the agency had a program that pays for what it calls 'public policy pay phones,' in other words those deemed necessary for public safety in unprofitable locations.

In 1996 the Federal Communications Commission put states in charge of seeing that such phones were available where needed.

California began charging phone companies a fee for each of their pay phones, accumulating nearly a million dollars to help defray the cost of public policy pay phones.

None of the money has been given out, however, said Terrie Prosper, the spokeswoman for the state commission.

Prosper confirmed that no mechanism had been created to distribute money from the program.

A state commission official suggested to Goodwin that Canyon buy its own pay phone, and Goodwin took up a collection.

Uilkema contributed $450 in county money; each family in Canyon was asked to donate $20.

Goodwin used $700 to buy a refurbished phone from a local company, Pelican Communications, ignoring the advice of its vice president, Jason Scherer, that Canyon lease a phone for $45 a month so Pelican would handle repairs.

'Residents couldn't afford it,' Goodwin said.

If the new phone breaks down, he reasoned, Canyon is 'a fix-it-ourselves community.'

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