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By Mark Baker 
The Register-Guard
  

CORRECTION (ran 1/05/05): Call 747-8405 if you would like to tour the Telephone Pioneer Museum in downtown Eugene.
A story in Sunday's paper gave the incorrect phone number.

Ten o'clock on a Monday morning on the first floor of a 77-year-old building in downtown Eugene.
Phones, lots of phones, all around you. Pink Princess phones, yellow phones, orange phones, beige phones, brown phones, a red phone from Chicago melted by a fire and black metal phones. Old black metal phones. Desk phones, wall phones, business phones and private phones. Dial and touchtone. A 1980s-era cell phone as heavy as a brick. If you've never been to Eugene's Telephone Pioneer Museum, you're not alone. But you really should go, and marvel at the phone. Then phone home. And tell others to come see all the phones, too. You'll get a history lesson and take a step back in time.

"I get kids in here all the time and they always ask, `Where's the redial?' " says Fred Wiechmann, a retired phone company employee who worked first for the Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Co., before it became Pacific Telephone Northwest, then was called Pacific Northwest Bell when he retired in 1975.

"And I tell them, `There's your redial, right there!' " Wiechmann says, holding up his right index finger.

Yes, believe it or not kids, once upon a time you actually had to dial - not push in - a phone number, letting the dag-blasted thing spin all the way back before dialing each successive number. As recently as the 1970s, in fact. Or even today, if your folks own one of the relics.

The quirky museum is open only from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. every Thursday, or by appointment - such as for school field trips. The volunteers - all retired phone company workers - who staff it still marvel that so few folks come by.

"There's a lot of people that don't even know it's around," says the 80-year-old Wiechmann, who started as a janitor in 1949 with the Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Co. before moving into several other positions, such as splicer and lineman.

Wallace Donnelly, also a retired lineman, started the museum and ran it until he died in 1993. Donnelly collected phones and other gear during his career and didn't want to see the history of one of mankind's most important inventions lost to time.

The retired volunteers who staff the museum are part of a larger group - the Telephone Pioneers - that grew out of Chapter 31 of Telephone Employees Activities Association, born in 1931.
They still hold monthly meetings at the Elk's Lodge.

The phone museum is in the same building that houses the Eugene branch of the phone company Qwest, which bought US West in 2000. Although the four-story brick building looks fairly modern, underneath is the original brick of the building constructed in 1928, Wiechmann says.

An enlarged black-and-white photograph of the building when it opened, showing the old Chryslers and Oldsmobiles and Fords lined up along  East 10th Avenue, sits on the eastern wall in the museum, which is really just a small, rectangular shaped room with windows looking out upon the sidewalk.

The unusual museum is filled with fascinating things, from replicas of Bell's harmonic telegraph transmitter (the original produced the first sound transmitted by phone on June 2, 1875) and his tuned reed receiver (the original received the first intelligible speech transmitted by phone on March 10, 1876), to a switchboard used by the Shaniko Hotel in Eastern Oregon from 1907 to 1947.

There's a replica of the first commercial desk phone, used by a Boston banker in 1877; a one-page list of all the subscribers of the Portland Telephone Co. in 1878; a chunk of coax cable that once ran underground along Interstate 5 - from Mexico to Canada - near Roseburg; and one of the first touch-tone phones that came out in 1964.

And all of it sits upon a magenta carpet that welcomes you from the westside door off of East 10th Avenue. From the street, you can gaze in and wonder what the heck all of this is. Passers-by often do, as two young women did on this particular Monday morning in December.

If traffic at the museum is still slow after all these years, it's not for want of things to see. Folks still bring items in, such as the guy whose father once worked for the phone company, who recently brought a box of old cable records showing where underground cables ran.

"I have stuff down in the basement that I'd like to bring up here, but I've got no room," says Wiechmann, who knows of only one other phone museum in the Northwest, that being the much larger one in Seattle.

Oh, well. Until the museum can find the room, those who come will have to settle for what's here.

And it is much, including the glass case that contains newspaper articles about the 1975 earth slide in Canyonville that killed seven phone company employees who were splicing broken phone lines during heavy rains and flooding. And the old photographs of phone exchanges in places such as Marcola, Drain, Junction City and Harrisburg. And the old, brown wooden phone booth that contains a sticker reading: "In honor of the 37 college students who died cramming into this phone booth."

No, it didn't really happen.

"That's tongue-in-cheek," Wiechmann says with a grin.

The Telephone Pioneer Museum, however, is not tongue-in-cheek. It really happened, it's really here and it contains a little "splice" of life from the good ol' days, before college campuses and
shopping malls were peppered with cell-phone-chatting youngsters, when a telephone was a practical thing, not a material thing. When Ma Bell was just a babe.

TELEPHONE PIONEER MUSEUM

What: Eugene's very own telephone museum has existed near the southeast corner of East 10th Avenue and Oak Street since 1983 in
a small room on the first floor of what is now the Qwest building, built in 1928.

Where: 112 E. 10th Ave.

Hours: Open Thursdays 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. or by appointment. Call Fred @ 541-747-8405 for tours.

Cost: Free.