When alerted that a huge quantity of high school and college yearbooks available at archive.org my instincts said to look for payphone and phone booth photos. They had to be there, right? What school didn’t have a couple of payphones on their campus?

Sure enough, in many yearbooks from the 1950s through 1990s a photo of someone gabbing on a payphone appears. The quest felt like “Where’s Waldo?”, since photos including payphones rarely included a text description. Why would they? Unlike today everyone knew what a payphone was.

So far the earliest evidence I’ve found comes from the 1959 issue of “Kochaviah”, the yearbook for the Stern College for Women in New York. The unidentified woman, clearly posing, smiles and holds on to the phone booth door handle.

An intriguing shot from the 1968 edition of “Masmid”, the yearbook for Yeshiva University, shows a man standing outside one of New York’s Chinatown pagoda-themed phone booths, the final versions of which saw removal relatively recently, in 2016. This snapshot would seem to capture one of the staid rituals of the payphone era: Waiting for the payphone hog to finish their call. Or is this a photo shoot? The dude on the left might be working an SLR camera.

Some of these yearbooks for NYC-based institutions turn out to be pretty good sources for New York City photography. The above-mentioned 1968 “Masmid” opens with this cool 2-page spread of Times Square, and yes, a couple of phone booths appear at far right. Click the image for greater detail.

1992’s “Hornet”, the yearbook for Morris College in Sumter, South Carolina, had a few pictures of campus payphones in use, including this one captioned with a sentence you don’t hear much these days: “Collect call, please!”

The real prize in this first round of phone booth hunting in school yearbooks comes from the 1962 issue of “Tower”, the yearbook for Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York. This photo captures at least five women taking part in some phone booth stuffing, a fad mostly associated with the 1950s but which endured into the ’60s. The two hands on the left seem a little off. It looks like the left hand is not connected to an arm.

I’ve had no luck with pre-1950s yearbooks, but I would think that yearbooks from the early days of the phone booth might have some incidental evidence of their existence. Evidence, in the form of unpretentious documentation of payphones in the real world, is what I seek.

I found the sheer quantity of yearbooks available at archive.org a little surprising. For as long as I can remember I assumed public sharing of that sort of thing, along with school literary magazines and newspapers, was off limits either on account of copyright ambiguity or just as a matter of decorum. I further assumed that copyright concerns and potential sensitivity of the content explained why businesses were built not just to cash in on all that free content but to keep access to it accountable.

But such are the times in which we live. Everything is public. I know this as well as anybody, and I do not mean to sound shocked or naïve. But when my high school poetry and horrible yearbook photos start washing up on archive.org I don’t think it will make the world a better place.

Publishing these things to the open Internet seems a bit like publishing someone’s personal diary, particularly in yearbooks which include signatures, handwritten messages from friends, and the home addresses and phone numbers of students. Sure, those addresses and phone numbers look old, but some people stay put for decades.

I found lots more phone booth pictures than these. Look for more in either another posting or a separate photo gallery.