Back in May of this year I was contacted by a gentleman in the San Francisco area.  He told me that he had been holding on to a telephone that once belonged to his grandmother.  The phone had been sitting in a closet for twenty-five years, since he purchased it from the Telephone Company after his grandmother passed.  Jim wrote in part,  “My Grandmother loved to talk on the telephone and many of my fondest memories are of her sitting in her big chair talking on it.  I believe the phone is a Western Electric Model 202 from 1930-1937.”

Jim asked if I could refurbish the phone and agreed to e-mail me photographs.  I told him that I was sure I could help and the phone was soon headed east.This is one of the photos that Jim e-mailed to me.  Attached to the ringer box was a smaller box with a switch on the top.  It was unfamiliar to me but I guessed that it either switched to a second phone line or was used to switch the ringer on and off.  It looks like there were several coats of paint after all these years.  I had my work cut out for me—but it looked like it was going to be a fun project. Read the rest of this post »

One of my latest telephone refurbish projects is this handsome North Electric “Galion” phone.  So called because it was manufactured by the North Electric Company of Galion, Ohio.  Early models of this phone were made with metal housings but were later made of Bakelite.

North Electric "Galion" Phone

Although North Electric (not to be confused with Northern Electric of Canada) did manufacture their own dials, they also released phones with dials from other manufacturers.  This particular telephone was made in 1953 with an Automatic Electric rotary dial. Read the rest of this post »