Through my research into the history of phone booths in the United States I came across a relatively unknown and possibly untrue anecdote involving the 27th President of the United States. Despite its whiff of legend I was intrigued enough that I contacted the real experts at the William Howard Taft National Historic Site to see what they knew about it.

The lore of William Howard Taft is littered with apocryphal anecdotes claiming the portly president became trapped in various predicaments on account of his weight. The most famous of those stories purported that Taft had become stuck in the White House bathtub, where aids were summoned to extract him.

In July 1908 several newspapers around the country published a similar story claiming that Taft, while staying at a hotel in Hot Springs, Virginia, was unable to get himself out of a phone booth. The source for the story was, strangely enough, a presidentially-named individual named George Bush. Most likely no relation to future Presidents Bush this fellow was an electrician at the Southern Bell Telephone company. Here is the story as it appeared in the Akron Beacon Journal of July 28, 1908. (If it’s too small to read just click on the story for a full-size image)

Certain details vary from one paper to the next but the story as it appeared in several publications is essentially the same. William Howard Taft squeezed into a standard sized phone booth to make a phone call. After he completed his call he found himself wedged so snug into the booth that he was unable to get out. A carpenter was summoned, a saw was employed to cut the phone booth into pieces, and Taft was freed. It was decided by the phone company that the standard sized phone booth would be replaced with an oversized one — the biggest one south of the Mason & Dixon Line —  so that Taft could make future calls without risk of entrapment.

At right is another article about the alleged incident, this one from the El Paso Herald, July 30, 1908, detailing how Taft had trouble even getting in to the booth.

My inquiry about this matter, asked of a nice gentleman who answered the phone at the William Howard Taft National Historic Site in Cincinnati, was rewarded with the answer I was sort of hoping for, but not really. He laughed and said he had “never heard that one.” I took some satisfaction in thinking I had found an obscure anecdote that confounded even the experts. But then he added, as I had already thought myself, that numerous stories of Taft getting stuck in some predicament on account of his weight had circulated over the decades. Virtually all of them were false. The most famous yarn, in which he allegedly was trapped in a White House bathtub, did not even surface until 20 years after Taft had left office. That story has been uniformly discredited as myth by the likes of history.com and many other sources. The Taft Historical Site gentleman flatly stated that the bathtub canard is nonsense, and in so doing strongly suggested that the phone booth story was as well.

Myth or not I find the possibility that a man of Taft’s size getting stuck in a phone booth to be far more believable than the better circulated myth about the bathtub. Newspaper and magazine stories from the early 20th century frequently describe phone booths as dangerously suffocating and even deadly structures from which ordinary people were sometimes unable to escape. Would William Howard Taft, at 5’11” and 340 pounds, have had trouble squeezing into one of those little compartments? If so then the flipside possibility that he would also have trouble getting out does not seem extraordinarily far-fetched.

I did happen to find follow-up materials which, in spirit at least, complemented the Hot Springs story. After assuming office Taft’s administration oversaw the modernization of the White House Telephone Room, as described in the January 22, 1910, issue of Telephony magazine. Written by Walden Fawcett the story, “How Uncle Sam Uses the Telephone”, describes the new Telephone Room, mentioning that a custom phone booth had been built specifically to accommodate the President’s girth. Maybe this was not the first time an extra-large phone booth had been built for Taft:

“The distinctive characteristic is the roominess of the interior. Not only will the booth accommodate satisfactorily so big a man as President Taft, but there is ample space for a stenographer to stand beside the President’s chair inside the booth in case the Executive should desire to have a memorandum taken down in shorthand as he receives it over the telephone.”

The article includes this image of Taft’s commodious White House telephone booth:

I mentioned this enormous phone booth to the gentleman at the Taft Historical Site. He responded that yes, indeed, Taft had all kinds of special furniture and accoutrements built to accommodate his weight, including the infamous one-ton oversized bathtub big enough to fit four ordinary sized people. An oversized phone booth, soundproofed for the privacy of presidential communications, would have been one example of such custom-made items.

I give the Hot Springs telephone booth story a few notches of credibility above the more famous bathtub story, which is supported by absolutely no documentary evidence. The phone booth incident, on the other hand, was widely covered around the time it allegedly occurred and primary sources included detailed reportage on sources. How much extra credibility that gives the story is best left to Taft historians more knowledgeable than I.

DEATH BY PHONE BOOTH

Early 20th century phone booths could be dangerous places in which to get trapped. Innovation in the realm of circulating air within phone booths does not appear to have gained traction until around 1908, when the B.F. Sturtevant Company and other companies began advertising products such as the Electric Booth Ventilator.

Until then stories such as a front-page piece in the July 26, 1903, New York Times were distressingly common. The Times report tells the harrowing story of one James Calhoun who became trapped in a phone booth at the Morrisania Police Court in the Bronx. These incidents reveal that early developers of the phone booth, desiring to make the structures as soundproof as possible, seem to have skimped on access to an invisible little something we living organisms call Air:

“(Calhoun) entered a sound-proof telephone booth in an adjoining room and closed the heavy double door behind him. When he was through with the telephone he started to leave the booth to find himself a prisoner.”

The lock was broken. This was known to employees of the courthouse but they neglected to inform Mr. Calhoun.

“Thoroughly alarmed, he lost his presence of mind and beat upon and kicked on the woodwork of the booth. He yelled for help from the inside of the sound-proof booth. He had grown so weak in the close atmosphere of the booth that he was unable to break the glass sides with his fists.”

Calhoun, starting to lose consciousness in the air tight chamber, found the presence of mind to – wait for it – PICK UP THE PHONE and call the police. Help arrived but it was almost too late.

“The court officers pried open the door and found Calhoun lying on the floor of the booth semi-conscious. It took fully 15 minutes to revive him at the time of his recovery he was blue in the face, but still vainly trying to free himself. His hands were bruised and bleeding, showing the struggle he had made for freedom, which would not have been difficult if he had not lost his presence of mind.”

An even more disturbing account of being trapped in a phone booth comes from the front page of the Pittsburgh Daily Post (Feb. 21, 1908). It was reported that 20 year old Jennie Jones was burned to death in a booth as helpless bystanders watched in horror, the door locked from inside such that nobody outside could open it. A cooking accident had caused her clothing to be covered with burning alcohol:

“In her excitement the frantic young woman rushed into the telephone booth, closing the door behind her. It fastened with a sprring (sic) lock and could not be opened from the outside.

“The young woman had been burned almost to a crisp. She was hurried to Mercy hospital, where she died at 5:45 o’clock.”

In a way stories such as these make Taft look lucky. A man of his size probably would not have been able to close behind him the door of the phone booth into which he squeezed, sparing him even the possibility of fates such as those experienced by the unfortunate James Calhoun and Jennie Jones.