Phone Booth Scene From “The Bad News Bears Breaking Training”

A phone booth with a rotary dial phone makes a brief — very brief — appearance in the 1977 film “Bad News Bears Breaking Training”. I did not watch any other part of this movie so I don’t know if the appearance of the booth had particular relevance within the context of the story. What I found interesting about it is how it captures a cultural ritual that many people have never encountered, or else forgot about: Waiting in line to use a payphone while the “payphone hog” selfishly ties up the line.

I used to encounter payphone hogs seemingly every single night when I lived at the Parc Lincoln on West 75th Street in 1990 and 1991. Seriously aggressive enforcement of getting people to make their calls as brief as possible often took place in the form of catcalls and screams from others waiting on line. “IT’S A PUBLIC PHONE, HOLMES!” was a regularly-heard pronouncement when someone in one of the four booths was obviously talking too long. “YOU CAN’T TALK ALL DAY!”

This photo shows those old booths at the Parc Lincoln, from 1991, long since removed. This space has since been replaced by a restaurant named ‘Cesca.

A contributing factor that made some people keep their conversations going so long was that in the early 1990s calls from payphones did not require a new coin deposit after 3 minutes, like they do today on most New York City phones. I remember standing in these booths for long stretches of time, late at night when no one else needed to use them, listening to the old “Apology Line“. Programs at “Apology” ran pretty long but I sat in these booths and listened as long as I wanted on a single coin.

The last time I saw lines of people waiting to use a payphone was probably after the east coast earthquake of 2011.

Back in 2006 I had the unexpected distinction of actually being the payphone hog. I did a radio interview for the BBC and, by my suggestion, took the radio network’s call from a payphone. One of the few phones around that allowed incoming calls happened to be nearby.

I don’t know how long we’d been conducting the interview before I noticed someone standing behind me, a safe distance back, but still a strange place for someone to just stand.

It appeared he wanted to use the phone, or at least that’s what he wanted me to think with his clearly put-on air of annoyance. Plenty of other payphones existed in that area, so I didn’t see what made this one worth waiting for. I also did not want to end the interview.

He scowled in such a way that to me belied the fact he was just trying to be a jerk. He moved on and the call lasted a good hour or so.