Bakelite
I miss my landline-specifically, my use of the 1937 Western Electric telephone that now sits unplugged on my desk, having yielded to the inevitable. I used it with great pleasure when I lived in San Francisco in the Nineties. Although I lived in the Haight-Ashbury district, site of The Summer of Love™, I was established on the top floor of an 1892 Queen Anne (which once had horse troughs installed in the back), and my landlord was a survivor of the Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906; I listened to the news on a cathedral radio. I bought the Western Electric for a pittance from a Carson City couple who spent part of their retirement acquiring and restoring old phones.
I remember the excitement of bringing it home and plugging it in and dialing a number for the first time. I loved the spring-driven mechanical music of the dial and its slight resistance against my finger. I loved the Bakelite, as black and shiny as obsidian. I loved the sturdy finger stop and the heft of the handset-so different from the flimsy plastic telephone I'd been using.
The only problem was the bell, which was too clangorous for me to ever get accustomed to; it made me sit bolt upright when I'd get middle-of-the-night calls, most of them wrong numbers. My apartment was tiny (just one room, but with a compensatorily spectacular view of city and bay), so I didn't exactly require a loud alert to summon me from a distance. I dampened the noise by wrapping a rubber band around the clapper, which resulted in a pleasant ticking sound and far less anxious sleep.
It amuses me to think that there was a time when people actually required instruction for using a rotary phone, even as late as the Fifties. But would it be so obvious to people born after, say, 1980? Maybe if they've seen their share of old movies. I don't envy the generation whose only experience of phones is the wireless, digital kind. The iPhone and its imitators may be beautiful objects, but I'm made uneasy by the lack of moving parts. There's no coiled cord to absently toy with, no dial to turn, nothing to grip with impunity when bad news arrives. And don't get me started on touchscreens.
Sometimes, when I'm sitting at my desk doing nothing in particular, and in danger of zoning out and getting lost in the middle distance, I'll reach over and pick up the handset of my Western Electric and randomly dial a seven-digit number like some kid with a Playskool phone. I'll bring the receiver to my ear, let it linger briefly and mutely there, then settle the handset back in its cradle, savoring the distinctive clop of Bakelite-on-Bakelite.
Someone, I forget who, once remarked that the old-fashioned telephone handset made the perfect murder weapon. That remark, or scenario, was the first thing that came to mind when I read years ago about the 1972 murder of socialite Barbara Baekeland by her son Tony. Baekeland had been married to the grandson of the man who invented Bakelite. When London police arrived at the Baekeland penthouse on Cadogan Square, they found Barbara dead on the floor and her schizophrenic son ordering Chinese takeout over the phone. Murder is a horrible thing, and matricide particularly horrible. But is it so horrible of me to hope that Tony ordered his Mu Shu pork on a Bakelite telephone?
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