The Mojave Desert Phone Booth. Killing the thing you love.

PHOTOGRAPHS by Paul Morse

Many moons ago, near the dawn of the Internet Age, I wrote a story about a phone booth that languished for decades in the middle of nowhere, left for dead in the uninhabited wilds of the California Desert.

The phone booth had become an Internet sensation. People called it from all over the globe.

But just months after my story ran on the front page of the Los Angeles Times, officials removed the booth.

What I had set out to celebrate, I instead helped kill.

And it broke my heart.

Let me tell you the story.

Like some ancient archeological find, the phone booth was "discovered" in 1997 when, on a hunch, hiker and computer entrepreneur Godfrey “Doc” Daniels stumbled into the Mojave Desert Preserve, 14 miles from the nearest paved road.

Dust-covered and quite abandoned, the old contraption just sat there, lonely and uncalled, its folding door gone, a relic from another age surrounded by sagebrush and wandering cattle.

He couldn't believe his eyes.

“All its glass had been shot out,” he said later, “but I thought it was beautiful.”

Daniels created a web page -- a sort of phone booth fan site -- that included photos and a satellite image, and listed the booth’s number.

The website went viral, promoted by both the media and word-of-mouth and, just like that, the old booth became an unlikely cult sensation.

People called.

Man, did they ever.

Hundreds and hundreds. Maybe thousands.

A skunk-owner in Atlanta. A bored teenager in Berlin. Two naked girls in LA looking for fun. A Denver bill collector given the number on a bum steer. There were also repeat calls from someone identifying himself as “Sergeant Zeno from the Pentagon.”

They dialed in, both the crazy and the curious, at all hours of the day and night, some hoping in vain that another human would somehow pick up. Others were more existential, merely wanting to make a sound in the middle of the abyss. 

And so the Mojave Desert Phone Booth phenomenon was born, with a new Internet subculture working overtime to perpetuate “the loneliest phone booth on Earth.”

Daniels himself was its most passionate fan.

He'd first read about the booth in an obscure letter-to-the-editor in some 'zine he'd picked up at a bar in Phoenix. The letter gave no idea as to the phone booth's precise location.

But it did give a phone number.

Daniels wasn't even sure if the thing was real. But for some reason, he called the number, and kept calling. He even got his friends to call. He left himself a Post-It note on his bathroom mirror, reminding him to call the phone booth.

He didn't need it. Eventually, he was calling every hour.

Nobody answered. 

Finally, after maybe his millionth try, he got a busy signal. Many redials later, trying the catch the mystery phone user, someone answered.

Daniels was dumbfounded.

It was a woman's voice.

"Are you in the Mojave Desert?" he asked.

She was.

"Why?"

She said her name was Lorene, and that she ran a nearby cinder mine.

She didn't have a phone and was at the booth to make a call. 

Before he hung up, Daniels forgot the ask the most important question: Where in the Mojave Desert was she?

But it was too late. She was gone.

So, he did some sleuthing and found a map of the Mojave Desert Preserve with a mysterious X he figured might be the phone booth.

He drove out with a friend and finally, long after dark, near a lonely dirt road, his headlights beamed onto something that seemed prehistoric.

A pay phone.

He paged a friend and asked him to call the number, just to be sure.

The phone rang.

It rang, really, really loudly.

Daniels was thrilled.

After that, he kept visiting the site, chronicling his adventures on his website. Each time he returned, sometimes for a few days, the phone rang constantly. He had to disengage the receiver so he could sleep.

Still, he was hooked.

In the late summer of 1999, I wrote a story about the Mojave Desert Phone Booth and its chronic callers. It was one of those experiences I will always remember fondly for its adventure and oddball eccentricity. 

The piece also taught me a valuable lesson about the power of journalism, both good and bad.

Because just a few months after it ran telephone officials decided the old phone had taken its last call.

Quite unceremoniously and without notice, they disconnected the number. Then they ripped the booth out and hauled it away like a bad memory.

Maybe this horrible turn of events wasn’t all my doing, because I wasn’t the only one who’d profiled the phone booth phenomenon, but I had no doubt played a sorry role.

Seeking to chronicle, you damage.

Which left me thinking, how is it that a story written with the best of intentions, with a compulsion to describe and celebrate some hidden tribe, could go so terribly wrong?

The phone booth wasn’t the only casualty to my journalistic curiosity.

There were others, like one about the barber shop in North Hollywood where a homeless man named Russ Turner, a former studio musician turned street-alcoholic, gave impromptu recitals on an old piano that had been shoved against a wall.

The landlord didn’t like the publicity, so he broke the lease and kicked out the barbers.

My wife soon cautioned me whenever I found some awesome new story.

“Don’t write about it,” she’d say. “You’ll kill it.”

In that crazy phone-booth summer, I was a newspaper “rover” who traveled California and Nevada in search of bizarre tales.

I can’t recall where I read about the booth, probably online, but I quickly approached my editor, Lenny Bernstein, and suggested a story. 

Why not memorialize this public phone, installed in the 1960s and operated with a hand crank by nearby volcanic cinder miners and other denizens, on its unlikely rise to popularity, fueled by the globe’s most advanced communications system: the Internet?

“Maybe I just go out there and answer it for a day,” I said, “see who calls.”

He was intrigued.

Lenny pitched the idea to Roger Smith, guru of the newspaper’s Column One, the signature front-page space for narrative story telling.

In those days, Column Ones were hard to land, especially for also-ran scribes like me, due to the insane competition among the newspaper’s stellar staff of veteran writers.

My editor returned with the good news.

Roger had approved the story without even seeing it, making the decision on a mere one-sentence pitch.

What’s that, you say, a phone booth in the middle of the desert?

Sold!

I was launched, Mojave Desert-bound.

Luckily, staff photographer Paul Morse, my good buddy and bike-riding companion, got the assignment. We flew to Vegas, rented an SUV and headed west.

Finally, 20 miles west of the state line, we exited Interstate 15 at Cima Road, and pulled into a gas station for directions.

The pump jockey just pointed into the desert, toward a rocky and rutted dirt track accessible only by four-wheel-drive.

“Out there,” he said.

We drove, bouncing along, losing teeth fillings, past a sign that warned: Danger! Not Maintained!

After an hour, we spotted a line of telephone poles.

Then, there it was: our quarry.

What we found wasn’t a phone booth, but a holy shrine. 

The glass was still missing, but on the roof perched a nude Barbie doll. Scratched into the metal frame were its longitude and latitude coordinates. Inside, along with plastic-coated children’s magnets spelling out “Mojave Phone Booth,” were candles, license plates and a small American flag.

Visitors had covered the booth’s bullet holes with Band-Aids.

But there was something else.

Along with this altar to pop culture came an accidental caretaker, his tent pitched nearby.

Paul and I looked at one another.

WTF?

Was this fool going to spoil our telephone party?

Where the heck did he come from?

And how did he get here?

Rick Karr, a self-described 51-year-old spiritual wanderer, was instructed by the Holy Spirit to travel to the desert and answer the phone. The Texas native had previously spent 32 straight days fielding hundreds of calls from people like Bubba in Phoenix and Ian in Newfoundland.

There were also the repeated contacts from the mysterious “Sgt. Zeno from the Pentagon.” 

“This phone,” he said with a weary sigh, “never stops ringing.”

Rick, as it turned out, was cool.

We all hung out, taking turns answering calls.

I’d pick up the receiver with a very business-like,”Mojave Desert Phone Booth.”

“I can’t believe it,” a voice would say. “There’s actually someone out there.”

It was still high noon, too bright for photographs, so Paul busied himself with finding just the right angle when he would have his chance come dusk, when the fading sun light is suggestive and moody.

At one point, we took a break, our backs against the booth, when a herd of cattle wandered by. They spotted us and gave us wide berth.

Rick paused and said to no one in particular.

“Man, cows are stupid creatures.”

But maybe we were the ones mentally challenged.

When dusk fell, Paul took a stunning purple-hued photo of Rick inside the booth, a shot he later reprinted and gave me as a memento. 

By the time we set to leave, we were all pretty slap-happy.

That’s when the German kid called. 

Teenager Jan Spuehamer of Hamburg was stunned when I picked up.

“This is costing me a lot of money, but I think it is very funny,” he said. “One magazine article said you have to be very lucky to have someone pick up this line. Because this is the loneliest phone in the world, no?”

I told him that it was indeed.

I said we three were really, really lonely out here.

Then I popped the question as my two fellow phone operators snickered nearby.

“So, do you have a sister?

“Yes,” the kid answered, his accent thick. “But she does not want to talk to you.”

The story began under this headline: “Reaching Way Out”:

MOJAVE NATIONAL PRESERVE — With only the lazy Joshua trees and hovering buzzards out here to bear witness, this isolated expanse of high-desert plain could well be among the quietest places on the planet.

By day, the summer heat hammers hard and the dull whistle of the wind is the only discernible noise. Come nightfall, the eerie silence is often pierced by the woeful bleat of a wandering burro.

But wait. There’s another sound.

Along a line of wooden power poles running to the horizon in both directions, 14 miles from the nearest paved road, a solitary pay phone beckons with the shrill sound of impatient civilization.

Then it rings again. And again. And yet again, often dozens of times a day.

The callers? A bored housewife from New Zealand. A German high school student. An on-the-job Seattle stockbroker. A long-distance trucker who dials in from the road. There’s a proud skunk owner from Atlanta, a pizza deliveryman from San Bernardino and a bill collector from Denver given a bum steer while tracing a debt.

Receivers in hand, they’re reaching out--at all hours of the day and night, from nearly every continent on the globe--to make contact with this forlorn desert outpost.

They’re calling the Mojave Phone Booth.

Here comes a curious caller now:

“Hello? Hello? Is this the Mojave Phone Booth?” asks Pher Reinman, an unemployed South Carolina computer worker.

Told by a reporter answering the line that he has indeed reached what cult followers call the loneliest phone booth on Earth, he exclaims: “Oh my God, I can’t believe it! Somebody answered! There’s actually somebody out there!”

Some readers got the story, others didn’t.

One wrote an email saying he’d picked up that Saturday morning’s paper and was flabbergasted to find this drivel in the place he expected real news.

My wife agreed.

But most readers were hooked. The phone booth became a regular destination for LA stoners who piled into a car and sped off into the desert.

Then came the proverbial wrong number.

Eight months later, Ma Bell pulled the plug, citing trash left at the phone and the people who got their cars stuck on that dreaded dirt road.

Cyber Space was outraged.

“You think maybe some phreaks stole it?” one disbelieving fan asked on a Web site devoted to the uprooted booth.

I got married the same week the phone booth died, moved to San Francisco, and got on with my life.

Not everybody did.

For years, people still visited the concrete pad where the phone booth once sat. Somebody fashioned a nifty tombstone. Then the U.S. Park Service removed the tombstone, and even dug up the concrete pad, leaving nothing behind but dust.

In 2006, somebody made a movie about the phone booth. There was a documentary called "Mojave Mirage." In 2014, the phone booth was featured on an Internet podcast.

In 2018, Daniels wrote a book, "Adventures with the Mojave Phone Booth".

His original tribute website still exists.

A few weeks ago, I got a call from a Swiss filmmaker working on a Mojave Desert Phone Booth documentary. He said he was planning an upcoming trip out to the desert.

I wished him luck.

In researching this piece, I found a 2013 story on the Daily Dot website that, partially at least, laid blame for that final phone fiasco squarely at my feet. 

“A Los Angeles Times reporter drove out to cover the story ended up fielding conversations with people he would never have been aware of otherwise,” the story read. “The Times article was the beginning of the end for the Mojave Phone Booth. It was less than a year later, in 2000, that Pacific Bell shut it down.’

So, there it was. 

In the podcast interview, Daniels says he blames himself for the demise of the phone booth.

So do I.

I have blood on my hands.

The Daily Dot story also mentioned that a hacker had resurrected the old number and posted it online.

There it was: 760-733-9969

The phone was back, in spirit anyway.

So I dialed the digits, reaching way out, as it were, and landed on some weird party line.

And then, amid the hiss of infinity, I repeated the lines Mojave Desert Phone Booth aficionados have been asking for, like, forever.

“Hello? Hello? Is anybody out there?”