Oregon Tavern Age: Rotary Phone

I sat with a friend in Oregon Tavern Age country in Oregon City—a choice dive—and one possessed of a truly great ownership story. So the female bartender told me, her mother had worked in the joint for 30 years, squirreled away some money, and finally bought it not too long ago, lock, stock and barrel, fulfilling a dream. The bartender told me this after her mother eased around her to go whip up the Sunday steak and eggs special.

That’s the entrepreneurial spirit, the only spirit, that will keep OTA country alive and save us all from brew pubs and snot nosed kids running around, making a racket, while their parents don’t parent.

The place was spacious and people were following the Pandemic rules, well, mostly. There was the grizzled, long haired, OTA man wearing a neon yellow safety vest and surfer shorts who kept coming up to everyone without wearing a mask, wanting to show off his new tattoo of an eel or snake. Everyone seemed to know him, Lloyd or Floyd. I didn’t quite catch it.

No one really wanted to see his tattoo, and I certainly did not when Lloyd/Floyd came up to our table and just stood there. I quickly masked up, and turned toward him. He was three feet away. I looked right at him. He was drunk. I said nothing. My friend said nothing. He said nothing. He left.

I watched him leave and go accost another patron. Behind me, an ancient golf video game starring John Daly, an OTA golfer if there ever was one, seized my attention. I doubt it had been played or serviced in a decade. I love old unused things still in operation. I was thinking exactly that when something else old in the joint caught my eye.

Across the room from our table, was a rotary phone mounted on a wall. I couldn’t believe it! It instantly brought to mind the old phones in all the OTA joints when I first started investigating them in Portland in my early 20s. These were the ones that had a direct line to Portland’s only taxi company. I don’t think you even had to dial. You just picked it up and an operator at the taxi garage hooked you up for a ride. I never used it, but saw people who did.

Nostalgia swept over me at the sight of the telephone. Oh for those days when you went to the phone booths or alcoves in dive joints and slapped in a quarter and called someone or to check your messages in an attempt to meet up later. It seemed like a million years ago.

The odd thing about this particular wall phone was its placement in practically the middle of the joint. You used this phone and everyone heard you. What sport that must have been for the patrons! You wanted to listen in and get the goods.

Contrast that with communication today: you are assaulted with phone conversations you don’t want hear! Nostalgia can really mess a guy up.

I pointed out the phone to my friend. I said there was no way it worked. There wasn’t any possible way a working rotary phone existed in an OTA joint or any other joint in the state or Western states for that matter.

My friend got up from the table to check it out. She picked it up, put the receiver to her ear, and then turned quickly back to me. She was smiling. The son-of-a-bitch had a dial tone! I would have thought you had a better chance of finding a heart in a Republican US Senator.

My friend bounded over to the table. I suggested we call the joint’s number. I wanted to hear that sweet sound of a real telephone ringing. She looked it up on her phone and called it. We heard a phone ring, but it wasn’t the one on the wall. It was coming from behind the bar, a modern sounding land line.

The next step was to go over to the wall phone and make a call. I was about ready to do so, when I stopped. The only phone number I knew by heart besides my own cell was my Mom. I couldn’t call my Mom from OTA country! How would I explain that?