Tom Laceky’s AP Payphone Reportage

Here’s an interesting story from the December 19, 1982, edition of the Billings Gazette, about an AP reporter who received some notoriety for writing down phone numbers of payphones in “public places where news might happen” and actually getting good information in doing so.

Tom Laceky jotted down the phone numbers of payphones at places like airports and courthouses, and indexed them. “[I]f there is a catastrophe at an airport, for example, he can quickly find the number of a nearby phone booth.” Rather than bother officials who are busy dealing with a disaster situation Laceky would get reportage from everyday citizens who happened to hear and respond to the ringing of a nearby payphone.

Journalists using payphones and phone booths to call in their stories was common until the cell phone and e-mail made that process cumbersome and unnecessary. But how common was it for journalists to turn the tables and call payphones in real time to source story material?

It’s hard to say but if Laceky was the first reporter to have done this he was not the last. I am reminded of the Baseball Stadium Payphone Project, in which Pepper Hastings endeavored to obtain payphone numbers from all 26 Major League Baseball stadiums and call in during the game to get real-time updates from fans at the game. This was in 1990, and it is unknown if Hastings was in any way inspired by Tom Lackey’s pursuit from when it made the papers 8 years earlier.

But there must have been some quantity of other journalists, reporters, and who knows what other types that kept a similar collection of what Lackey called his “weird phone numbers”.

Long before I heard of either Mr. Hastings or Mr. Laceky I remember thinking that an unintended value in making payphone numbers available was their possible use in precisely the way they used them. The ability to reach into a place like that and connect with someone on the scene has an almost God-like miraculousness about it. But it’s also just clever thinking.

Today this trick would most likely be impossible, since virtually all payphones are programmed to reject incoming calls.