Cowboy Frank's Telephone Pages

Welcome to my latest web venture.

From early 1972 to about the middle of 1974 I worked for the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company (C&P), part of the famous Bell Telephone System. Specifically I worked inside the Western Electric manufacturing plant located at 1201 S. Hayes Street in Alexandria, Virginia, about 1/2 a mile south of the Pentagon. My job, along with about 9 other guys, was to sort phones and equipment that had been removed from service (taken out of homes and offices) and sent into this plant for cleaning and refurbishing. Primarily I worked a conveyor belt where we sorted an average of 14,000 telephone sets a day.

Ever since I was about 5 years old I had dreamed of being a telephone installer and serviceman. When I first began my job with C&P, they told me the position was intended to last about 6 months, after which they would move me out into other parts of the company. After almost 2 years, I was still there and starting to loose my mind. I have never been able to work repetitive task jobs for very long. If my mind isn't actively working on solving problems or learning new things, I get bored. I enjoy jobs that involve troubleshooting and helping other people, especially in the electrical and computer fields. I left the company in the summer of 1974, very broken-hearted.

During my time there, I acquired a couple of phones, as did most everyone else who worked for Ma Bell. I still have those 2 phones, but last fall my light blue, 10 button Princess phone, fell off a table and the case shattered into about 30 peices. Boy was I heart-broken (there's that phrase again). Then I thought of checking Ebay and what a resource that has turned out to be. I am now collecting phones like crazy, much to the dismay of my partner. I am trying to throttle my collecting, but am having difficulty achieving any real success. At least I am now only buying items I can actually use, are very unusual, or parts to repair phones that are broken.

In general, my collecting interest is in Western Electric phone equipment from the late 1960's through the end of the Bell System era in 1983.

I will be adding pages showing and describing my collection as I can find the time from my other web projects. One of my big planned projects is to scan and make available a set of Bell System Practices (BSP) manuals which contain technical instructions and schematic diagrams for many unusual Western Electric phones and devices. I bought a set of 29 BSP manuals on Ebay last week and expect them to arrive in the next week. The set includes several versions of the Station Specialty manuals and quite a few Key Telephone (office type phones) manuals.