Friday Flashback: Call Your Mother, Because 1988 Couldn't

By Karl Klockars in Miscellaneous on May 8, 2009 8:20PM

There are a few statistics that get thrown around every year: Tryptophan in turkey around late November, numbers of toilets flushed at the Superbowl, and the number of phone calls made on Mother's Day. That number dropped dramatically in the Chicagoland area back on this date in 1988 (which just so happened to be Mother's Day) when a fire at a Hinsdale Illinois Bell station knocked out phone service to 35,000 people in the DuPage area.

Back in those now-ancient days of everyone on a landline, the damage to the Hinsdale hub wreaked havok on the western suburbs. The damage kept phones down for weeks, and problems radiated out across the whole area. Flights were delayed at O'Hare and Midway because lines were out between radar stations. Hospitals used runners to summon doctors and were run almost entirely with 2 presumably brick-sized cellular phones. The line from a report on May 10th brings back plenty of memories: "Car phone service likely will be disrupted throughout the area as people increase use of portable phones, an official with Cellular One said."

Now that all of us have the world available in our pockets, can you imagine having to stand in line to make a phone call in a bus? It happened - mobile phone banks had to be used to get communications out. From the Sun-Times:

The 1959 GMC bus is custom-built with 18 phones, including a bank of "local" phones set up next to the center parked at Lincoln and 2nd streets, next to the burned-out switching station in the western suburb...Telephone company representatives said at least four more stations, such as the trailers used at Taste of Chicago and for emergencies, will be parked in locations to be announced today.

Local and long-distance calls are free - no coins needed in the pay phones under these circumstances - and the centers will operate round the clock, company officials said. Callers are tapped on the shoulder when two minutes are up...The traveling telephone bank on Tuesday was the place to find teens going into tele-withdrawal, businessmen having tele-nervous breakdowns and housewives trying to get things done.

And you thought that losing your Blackberry would be bad.

As the outage continued, people had to resort to letter writing to stay in touch, Ma Bell had to ask people restrict phone calls to emergencies only, police increased their street presence so that criminals wouldn't take advantage of the lack of 911, credit card transactions went unverified, and businesses were generally slowed to a near halt. One upside: telemarketers were dead in the water.

It wasn't until May 23rd that residents got local service back, while regional and long-distance phone service remained spotty at best for some time afterwards. An extra piece of trivia: Guess who owned the first commercial cellular network? Illinois Bell, 1983. Now, while we're on the subject, go call your mom.