A small selection of John Stambaugh’s antique telephones, Dallas, Texas
We sat down at one of his regular haunts, a Mexican food place where he always sat at the same table and the waiters knew to bring him the Martinez plate to eat along with a bourbon and Sprite to drink. I ordered a large plate of guacamole.
John had spent his entire career working for telephone companies, first in Dallas and then in San Angelo, where he was district manager, and then in Dallas again. I asked how he got interested in telephones.
“My mother claims that when I was too little to walk even, she was carrying me in her arms, and at that time we had wall telephones with a crank on the side, and I reached out and cranked a telephone.”
He told me this story several times over the next twenty-four hours.
When he got out of the army, in 1946, John went back to the University of Texas and majored in personnel management. He didn’t care what he majored in, he said. He just wanted to get out. Then he went to Dallas to work for the telephone company. He was even hired over the telephone, he told me, after he called a fella named Wigley in Dallas about a job. Mr. Wigley, who knew one of his professors, said he could hire him today but maybe not tomorrow, because of budget cuts. So John got on a bus and started work that day. He spent the night at the Dallas Y. In 1957 he went out to San Angelo to work for GTE, which later became Verizon, because he had a problem with a new man who came in at the telephone company in Dallas. Nobody could please him. John was the manager of the San Angelo district, which included Comanche, Sonora, and Big Lake. But after a few years he took a pay cut and a lesser job at his old company, he said, so he could get back to the Dallas scene.
He noticed my ring and asked if I was engaged or married? I said I was married. “Oh, you are? To a guy or a girl,” he asked, “not that it matters?” I began to understand why he might prefer Dallas to San Angelo.
We went back to his apartment, and John showed me his autobiographical novel, set in World War II. He had served in France and in Germany and wrote the novel about his experiences. His father had served at the same time, called up from the reserves and based in Muskogee, Oklahoma, as a range officer. One of his duties had been the relocation of Indian cemeteries in the Fort Gibson area.
Many of John’s old telephones were connected to an antique switchboard from 1887, and he showed me how it worked. He could make phones ring all over the house. Telephone technology had remained stable enough that he was able to route his outside line through the switchboard.
Back when he was running the San Angelo district for GTE, John often met with his rural clients, who sometimes owned their own lines and poles. Many were on party lines. I asked how the party lines worked, and he explained that there were many different arrangements, depending on the telephone company. People had different rings, and it depended on whether the ringing was by frequency or not. Sometimes everyone heard all the rings but usually only those who had the same frequency. He told funny stories about party-line feuds involving families with names I knew, like Cauthorn, Whitehead, Wardlaw, and Wardlow, and he wondered about the similarity of the last two names. He told one story about a woman who called him up and wanted to know how much it would cost to get a private telephone line out to her ranch south of Sonora somewhere. She was sick and tired of being on a party line. He said that her neighbors owned their own line, and they owned the poles as well, so maybe she could run her line on their poles and save some money. She wasn’t interested. She said that her neighbor was her sister and that son of a bitch is my brother-in-law. John laughed a long time at the memory.
The room with the switchboard contained dozens of black metal telephones from the 1930s and 1940s and one green plastic wall mount phone from the early 1960s that looked just like the phone we had in my first childhood home, a rental house on 219 Johnson Street, in Del Rio. They were all jumbled together on a set of wooden bookshelves on which were tacked six index cards listing the names, neatly typed, of telephone collectors who had visited the collection. They came from as far away as Edmonton, Alberta; Brea, California; and New Richland, Minnesota.
John showed me to a small bedroom and warned me that the toilet in the bathroom was broken. The faucet was leaking badly. The housework seemed to have gotten away from him. He mentioned a lady who used to clean for him, but she evidently hadn’t been there for a long time. I put a musty set of sheets on my bed and pushed the soiled pillow to the floor with my shoe. I decided to sleep in my clothes.
The next day John took me to a Burger King for breakfast, and we set off for Collin County, where Larkin Adamson in 1850 named the town of Weston after his hometown in Missouri. He built a store there and became the community’s first postmaster. We drove to a town called Celina and stopped at the visitor center and museum, formerly the home of the newspaper The Celina Record. John had donated an American flag, with forty-five stars on the blue field, that his mother, Lilian, had carried in a school play in 1895. The flag hung on the wall. We visited with Jane Huddleston, a very nice woman who helps run the museum, and looked at a book listing all the graves in the Cottage Hill Cemetery, where John’s parents were buried. We looked for Larkin Adamson and found his son, Larkin H., who died in 1900. His obituary, which was reprinted from the McKinney Democrat, said that he had died of consumption, “that fell destroyer.”
“Every spring time,” the text read, “the lovely flowers will raise their blooming heads above his grave, but he will continue to sleep the long, sweet sleep.”
As we left the museum, John spotted an old telephone in the window of an antiques store. I squinted and saw that a wooden wall phone was barely visible among the usual rocking chairs and armoires. John said he didn’t need any more telephones.
Are you sure? I asked. “I thought I saw a spot on the wall in your bedroom.” John just chuckled to himself.
I asked him if there were any good stories about the phones in his collection.
“No, not really.”
He said he found most of them in flea markets. On our way to the cemetery, I drove and John told me where to turn. We passed lush fields filled with pink wildflowers. “I don’t know where we are,” John would say, “but turn left. Wait a second, let’s go that way.” More fields, often populated with old tumbled-down barns, and then, “I think maybe I told you wrong. I think we need to go back.”
All of a sudden John said, “My grandfather’s farm was right there.”
I stopped in the middle of the road, a narrow two-lane blacktop.
He was very serious and intent, staring hard at the weathered barn with a rusty roof in a green field.
“That was his barn at one time. That’s where it was. That’s where my dad was raised, but the farm they lived in when I was growing up was this way.” He pointed.
I asked him if he used to play in that barn. A barn was a paradise for me when I was a child.
“Yeah,” he said. “We did.”
Eventually, we found ourselves in Weston, a pleasant little town without sidewalks or curbs. The sign out front of the First Baptist Church said OUR CHURCH IS PRAYER CONDITIONED.
Jane had told us to stop in and see Steve Goldstein, who sells eggs at the Weston store, but the store was closed. A sign advertised Texas honey. A scrap metal sculpture of a rooster stood guard out front of the charming redbrick building. Next door was the Weston Country Cafe, also closed. John said the café used to be the store. Down the street was a tiny little building with a sign that read OLD WESTON POST OFFICE, MARCH 15, 1900, POP. 316, RURAL FREE MAIL DELIVERY.
I got out and John waited in the car. The old post office was locked, but just up the street I noticed a weather-beaten wooden clapboard building with a metal roof. Pale strips of paint peeled from the walls, and redbrick pillars supported a carport. A bright blue tractor was parked in front. Sitting in the carport, before a pair of swinging garage doors, surrounded by lawn mowers and engines, was Kenneth Cowan, proprietor of Cowan’s Garage. A small sign with red letter
s bore a black silhouette of a Ford Model T.
Kenneth Cowan, Weston, Texas
Kenneth wore blue work clothes and blue suspenders and a black gimme cap that said TEXAS STAR BANK. His socks were white.
Kenneth said he was born in 1930 and had lived in Weston all his life. “Yeah, I been here about eighty-two years. Took time out and spent a couple of years in the army, but I hadn’t got very far from home.”
“Well, it’s a nice place, I don’t see any reason to get very far. I’m trying to figure out why my relatives left and ended up in West Texas.”
“Somebody come by and told them to go west.”
Kenneth told me that Mr. Adamson used to live right there in that house, right there. He pointed at a neat white house with blue trim across the street.
Larkin Adamson?
“Elby Adamson.”
He must have been Larkin’s son, or grandson, and thus a distant relative of mine. I asked about the post office, and he said it had been in quite a few different buildings and that it started out as a grocery store, as he recalled, right there where the little store is now. He gestured at the rooster.
Kenneth gave me clear, simple directions to the cemetery. On the way we passed a field with a ring of large pecan and oak trees. John said his father’s farm was right there. “I used to love to go there,” he said. “The house was right there. We used to swing on that big tree. The house was here, and a garden.” Somebody named Chad Alexander was advertising the property for sale.
We found the cemetery and the old marble obelisk marking the grave of Larkin H. Adamson. The inscription read IN MY FATHER’S HOUSE ARE MANY MANSIONS. With the help of a detailed map of the cemetery that John compiled many years ago, we came to the graves of his parents: J. Lee and Lilian J. Stambaugh. He stood before his parents’ graves for a long time. Then he suggested we get some lunch.
On the way to the restaurant he said if I wanted to, we could go back to the museum in Celina and look in the cemetery book to see where old Larkin was buried. I reminded him that we had already tried that.
I didn’t care where Larkin was buried anyway. A few minutes later he suggested that we could look in the cemetery book in Celina to see where old Larkin was buried.
At Lucy’s restaurant the waitress asked if we’d like to start off with some “fried green tomatoes, fried pickles, fried mushrooms, fried zucchini, fried jalapeños, or fried cheese.” John ordered ranch-style chicken and two sides and then asked the waitress to remind him what he had ordered. I decided to stick with sides: fried green tomatoes, green beans, and some okra.
Mounted on the wall behind me was a stuffed bobcat wearing a hat and a bandanna.
John spent much of his childhood in the lower Rio Grande valley, in the town of San Juan. He knew a man who made his living as a ditch rider, riding his horse along the irrigation canals that crisscross the rich alluvial floodplain. The irrigation company used to have its own private telephone switchboard that connected the telephones of all the ditch riders.
John Stambaugh, Collin County, Texas
Dr. John Brinkley, the famous border radio charlatan, had a hospital in San Juan in addition to his operation in Del Rio. John told me he thought Dr. Brinkley’s son Johnny had committed suicide while talking on the telephone with his mother.
“Do you know about Dr. Brinkley?” John asked me. “He had been a politician in Kansas, but they ran him out. His thing was he put goat glands in people instead of testicles. It was supposed to make them more potent. I don’t know what he did with the testicles.”
Our food arrived and John explained that there were two antique telephone collectors’ clubs. One of them, his club, organized a show every year in Abilene, Kansas, but the headquarters was in McPherson, Kansas, because that’s where the secretary lived. The other one was headquartered in Pennsylvania, because one guy got his feelings hurt and formed his own club. John thought that was very funny.
As we left, I struck up a conversation with the flirty young waitress, who told me her name was Caitlin, but “people call me Red.” She pronounced it “Ray-ed.”
Caitlin had a pretty oval face and strawberry blond hair. She asked me where I was from and was curious about my travels. I told her I was headed to Clay County and asked if there were any local attractions that she could recommend, and she immediately replied I should be sure to go see the Wichita Falls haunted insane asylum.
“My mom bought me this book that’s called Haunted Texas, and it’s all the places all over Texas that are super haunted. Do you have to go to Sherman? There’s either a black statue of Jesus in the Sherman cemetery or it’s the Happy family that died all on the same day at the same time. I forget. It was the coolest book I’ve ever had. I’ve got to find it.”
I asked her how I would know where to find the haunted insane asylum in Wichita Falls.
“Everybody knows it,” she said. All I had to do was ask. For a moment I thought maybe this was a roadside attraction, but she assured me it was simply an abandoned insane asylum and that it was super haunted. But trespassing?
“Well,” she said with a lilt, “we don’t care about that in Texas!”
I suggested that in Texas trespassing was a good way to get shot.
“Yeah, it’s a game,” she said, all flirty and gay. “We just see who can run faster and who’s a better shooter.”
I was about to take my leave when she thought of another haunting I might enjoy.
“Did you ever go to the Anson Lights, in West Texas? I swear to God, this is so true. It’s out by Abilene, you go down this dirt road, and you flick your lights three times—right, and it’s really far, and I didn’t believe it, I’m like this is so stupid, it’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever done, I mean, why did you make me come here? So I was in college,” her voice ascending, as if in questioning, “so we went down it, and it’s in the middle of nowhere, ahright, and this, you’ll see this lady come with a lantern, right, looking for her kids—you’ve heard that story a million times, right?—and when you go down there, there are two lights, one big light that you can see, have you seen like on a farm? how they have one big light, it’s got one light kind of in front of you, but way down there and it’s got a little bitty way over there?—anyways, I swear to you, I, Jesus Christ is my witness, ahright, and we went down there and we did it, and I mean, so stupid, and I swear to you, here comes the light and it’s doing this, all the way—”
“Swinging back and forth,” I offered, “like a pendulum?”
“Yes, I swear, like if somebody’s holding, you know—oh my gosh, it scared me to death!”
“So you click on your headlights three times? And people down there would tell me where to go to do this?”
“Yes, near Anson, just down a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. It’s terrifying. It scared me worse than anything. I was like, Ahhh! Get me the hell out of here! I haven’t seen the Marfa Lights, but I’d really like to.”
At this point John, who had been gamely trying to follow her narrative, piped in: “Have you seen the Marfa Lights?”
“I have not,” said Caitlin.
“But she’s seen the Anson Lights,” I said, “and that sounds scarier.”
I thanked Caitlin for all the good advice, and we turned toward the door.
“Thank you,” she said. “Y’all be good!”
—
Driving back to Dallas, I asked John if he knew anything about La Réunion. He mentioned a stadium by that name, and I explained that I meant the old French colony, a failed experiment in Fourierist socialism on the Elm Fork of the Trinity River, across from the old village of Dallas. He didn’t know anything about that, but he suggested I look in the history of Collin County that his parents wrote. I dropped him off and, after nosing around in his parents’ book, set off to find the last vestiges of the New Jerusalem in Texas.
Texas in the late 1840s and the 1850s, for a certain type of European radical, must have looked like paradise. Americans were busy with their
own feverish schemes. The conquest of northern Mexico had melted away the western border, opening vast new territories to the American imagination, into which poured the blood-and-soil agonies of slave power and the abolitionists as well as the laissez-faire frenzies of the California gold rush. European liberals and socialists, desperate for a new start after the failed revolutions of 1848 and gulled by shady offers of cheap land south of the Red River, came to see Texas as a good place to start over. Germans ended up in the Hill Country. The French were attracted to the tall-grass prairie country north of Dallas.
The first of these French colonies was the brainchild of Étienne Cabet, a socialist politician and newspaper agitator, who hatched a plan to found a utopia based on his 1840 novel Voyage en Icarie. Cabet made a deal with the Peters Company, which still controlled much of the land in North Texas between the Red and the Trinity Rivers, though titles were often far from clear. Cabet believed he had purchased a million acres and announced to the readers of Le Populaire that his followers would soon settle in a “new terrestrial paradise.” In fact, Cabet had secured grants of less than ten thousand acres, much of it in tracts scattered across the prairie north of present-day Dallas.
The first sixty-nine Icarians—“soldiers of Fraternity” charged by Cabet with the “regeneration of the human race”—arrived in New Orleans on March 27, 1848, and soon steamed up the Mississippi and the Red River to Shreveport, where they were astonished to discover they were more than 250 miles from their new home, a practically roadless stretch of swamp and prairie dotted with the occasional Anglo settlement. The Icarians spoke little English and had no realistic prospect of transporting their piles of steamer trunks over such a distance. They began a long march of suffering; dysentery, malaria, malnutrition, and exposure conspired against them. Many did not survive the summer. A second party of Icarians arrived, only to retreat to Shreveport and New Orleans. Cabet finally showed up in January 1849 and blamed the Texas disaster on its primary victims. He never set foot in Texas. Eventually, he took his last three hundred followers up the Mississippi to Nauvoo, Illinois, the former Mormon colony. After some years of prosperity under the dictatorial ministrations of Cabet, the colony fractured over the question of tobacco, with the pro-smoking “reds” arrayed against Cabet’s anti-smoking “whites.” The reds took control, and in November 1856 Cabet died of a stroke while planning yet another colonial venture.
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