Once upon a time the world was “full of phones.” Payphones, that is. The problem was that none of them worked, at least not in this brief excerpt from Season 1, Episode 1 of “Hill Street Blues.” Two police officers, attempting to summon help after their squad car was stolen, encounter a row of three curbside payphones. All the phones are busted up so bad they cannot be used (a not uncommon site even today, 35 years later).

Officers Bobby Hill (played by Michael Warren) tries to get fellow officer Andrew Renko (Charles Haid) to relax a little, as their situation could become dangerous. An increasingly irate Renko slams one mangled payphone handset after another. Officer Hill calmly responds with an almost meme-worthy observation: “Hey man, the world’s full of phones, man. Lots and lots of phones. Let’s go find one.”

They do not find one.

I have not watched “Hill Street Blues” in a long time. Given its early to mid-1980s vintage I would expect payphones to appear frequently throughout the series. Indeed, earlier scenes in this episode featured a payphone-to-payphone conversation between a law enforcement negotiator and the charmingly youthful hostage takers seen in this screen capture:

Just another installment in this potentially endless series of pictures and video clips featuring public pay telephones from times when they were more a part of the fabric of society than they are today. After stitching together what I thought was a pretty sweet payphone scene from Episode 1 of “Taxi” I am now through episode of 5 of that show, where the payphone at the garage has been summoned into action a few times with varying degrees of inelegance.