TELECOMMUNICATIONS A moment of silence for public pay phone

With its numbers cut by a third in the last decade, the end of the pay phone may be near.
BARNSTABLE, Mass. (AP) -- When next you pass a pay phone, stop. Pick up the handset and enjoy its dial tone for one melodious moment.
It may be awhile before you see another, unless you are planning a trip on public transportation or a hotel stay.
Obsolete to many mobile phone users, pay phones may be tempting extinction, suggest figures from the industry group, the American Public Communications Council. From a peak of 2.6 million in the mid-1990s, their number has rapidly withered to about 1.8 million.
Can arthritic old pay phones endure, stuck glumly to the wall, when newer wireless gizmos that send photos and text messages make even the basic cell phone seem passe?
"The public phone has just about no future," is the verdict delivered by James Katz, a communications sociologist at Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, N.J.
Is it time?
So let us break our cellular connections for a moment and be silent. Consider what coin-operated pay telephones have bestowed since William Gray invented them in 1889, supposedly hoping he'd find a phone more easily next time his wife got sick. Consider what pay phones still do.
Is it time to say goodbye to free emergency calls from telephones affixed reassuringly at street corners, waiting without discrimination for all comers? Don't expect help from Superman, either. Where's he going to pull on his spandex?
Will it be goodbye to coin calls you can really count on with a connection that shows up as dependably as Cal Ripken Jr. at the ballpark? No more reporters dashing or salesmen lumbering up to banks of pay phones?
Goodbye, then, to the few enduring booths and private conversations in private, instead of the corner booth at McDonald's. Even without their accordion doors, booths still drown out street noise and provide oases from the rain.
Of course, some public phones have been spared, especially in busy terminals of public transport. They may yet linger for years, serving cellular holdouts and other land line lovers.
"I've got a good cell phone," said Willard Nichols, president of the American Public Communications Council. "When I'm in an airport waiting for a plane and I want to talk business, I don't use the cell phone, just because of the vagaries of atmospherics."
Here come the collectors
You can almost smell technological obsolescence, though, when hoarders and collectors like Lee Spenadel start swarming. He has collected and restored 12 pay phones, dating from the 1930s to the 1970s.
But even he can't remember when he last used a pay phone outside his home in Wellfleet, Mass. "I'm a technologist at heart, and I believe the new technologies replace old, and perhaps its time has come," he says.
Half of all Americans -- about 148 million people -- now have cellular phones, according to the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association. That's more than 80 times the number of pay phones.
Consider Tim and Daryl Richardson, a father-son team of building remodelers. Out on a job, they pulled up their truck the other day at The Old Village Store in Barnstable, almost blocking the phone booth on the edge of the parking lot. They set their lunches on the truck's hood and, before long, whipped out cellulars.
"I rarely use my house phone. It's all on the cell," said the father. "I'd be lost without it."