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Floridians Not Ready To Hang Up On Pay Phones

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By BILL HUTCHINSON

Sarasota Herald-Tribune

Published: August 4, 2008

Ed Kaberna tells a story of a guy - he assumes it was a guy - who backed his truck up to a pay phone in Manatee County, wrapped the phone in heavy chains, and pulled the whole thing out of the ground, 4-inch concrete foundation and all, for a couple hundred dollars in quarters, nickels and dimes.

"People get desperate," says Kaberna, whose work gives him a window onto many and varied manifestations of human need.

Need drives Kaberna's business as the area's largest independent purveyor of pay phones.

"Let's face it," he says, "nobody uses a pay phone unless they have to."

Old-fashioned, coin-in-the-slot pay phones are used these days mostly by people who can't afford to carry a cell phone - a segment of the population experiencing a growth spurt in Southwest Florida.

In the past six months, Kaberna has seen an increase in the use of the 120 phones he owns at convenience stores and on street corners from Tampa to Fort Myers.

"If you're looking at a choice between putting food on the table or gas in the car, a cell phone is an easy thing to give up," says Kaberna, who calls the recent increase in his business "very slight," but nonetheless, "it's the first I've seen in many, many years."

Once, Pay Lines Were Often Busy

At 55, Kaberna retains some of the scrappy city-kid energy he brought down from Chicago when he followed the sun to Sarasota 30 years ago.

He worked on cars, hung drywall, waited tables at the Hyatt and finally settled down for a 10-year stretch as a franchisee for Snap-On Tools, a company he sold in 1990 for enough to get him started in the phone business.

And what a business it was back then, he says, recalling the heyday of the mid-1990s, with 3 million pay phones on America's streets, and the cash flow from any well-located dozen of them enough for a family to live on.

This was a decade after deregulation of the telephone industry, and private investors large and small were swarming around the promise of a lifetime of steady returns on small investments.

"Own your own phone company for $12,000" is the ad that got Kaberna's attention around 1991. What you got was "pretty much just three phones and a map," he says, but thousands of people around the country took such offers.

By the mid-1990s, the country's pay phone network had become a chaotic mess - "things started to get a little crazy," as Kaberna puts it - with phone owners in poor neighborhoods often charging exorbitant fees.

Some were also suspected of cooperating with drug and prostitution merchants doing business on their phones.

Kaberna, who on more than one occasion has found marijuana and crack stuffed into a coin tray, helped local law enforcement with a couple of stings some years back.

It ticks him off that legitimate "pay phone service providers," as those in his industry prefer to be called, are still tarred by the same brush as the bad guys.

"These days, believe me, every drug dealer has a cell phone," he says.

When Kaberna got into the phone business there were fewer than 1 million cell phones in this country. Today, there are 220 million, versus 1.5 million pay phones, a number that declines roughly 10 percent a year.

Along with record stores, photographic film manufacturers and crop dusters, Entrepreneur.com has designated pay phones one of the 10 American industries most likely to be extinct by 2017.

Kaberna is not buying it. Worst case, he believes, Congress will kick in with the Universal Service Fund it has been talking about for years, a measure that would at least guarantee pay phone service to the estimated 7 million or so Americans who live in poor neighborhoods or rural areas lacking a cell phone signal.

He has hedged his bets a bit by branching into vacuum cleaning equipment and ATM terminals at gas stations and convenience stores.

'That's Our Phone, Man'

Kaberna has a couple of phones that can bring in as much as $10,000 a year, a few that can go whole days without bringing in a single coin, and a couple of high-volume phones where he keeps the per-call rate at 25 or 35 cents, rather than the 50 cents that many of his competitors charge.

"For a lot of people in poor neighborhoods, the pay phone is the phone.

"I've seen places where some guy will be beating on a phone, trying to get the money out, and the people in the neighborhood, you know, start beating on him. 'That's our phone, man.' "

Phones have been good to him, Kaberna says. Since starting in the business, he met and married his second wife, who operates a promotion and design firm. He stopped drinking, which he admits had become a problem for him, and on Jan. 15, 1996, "had my miracle" - experienced a spiritual conversion the details of which he keeps private.

He will say, though, that his phones have become an instrument for pursuing what he calls "his mission," which involves work with the homeless.

Kaberna finds his flock at the Salvation Army center in downtown Sarasota, where he maintains five phones, or through panhandlers he encounters while on his collections route.

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