While on memory lane at 3636 Beverly
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Category Archives: Phone Company
3636 Beverly Boulevard
It’s first thing in the morning at 3636 Beverly Blvd. A Pacific Telephone building called “The Yellow Pages,” building because of the six story, lit, set of giant Yellow pages on the outside granite. All told, about ten floors. Old stained brick. I was given the task of showing a safety film on driving to some new guys. I had six months. A veteran in pay phones. I’m told to take these twelve guys up to an empty room anywhere I want on the empty eighth floor to hold said meeting. No one knows anyone else so no ones talking. Only sips of coffee from styrofoam cups can be heard in the jammed elevator. Old buildings have giant elevators. I roll the 16 mil film cart up to the first door entrance I come upon, twist the handle and shove the cart inside, while hitting the light switch. My third level boss is on short strokes on some chubby gal with his pants around his ankles. I back out with the gang. We found another office.
On a repair job off Hollywood Blvd., I put a tag on the chain link gate saying I tried to do the repair, but, the dog had the gate covered. Now, this was the part of the Blvd. near Laurel cyn. Where all the old stars estates begin…As I turn to jump in my Pac Bell truck, this long haired mafia looking dude, shouts at me to come back. He’s also letting the dog out of said gate as he keeps talking to me. I shit my pants. TWICE, when that dog came at me. Oh, it was friendly, HOW WOULD I KNOW. He had growled like crazy as I shook the gate and yelled towards the house. I end up stooping down and petting the big lug. He was at least two hundred pounds. Half Rottweiler, half St. Bernard. Real sloppy mouth, but a neat dog. I feel some odd bumps as I pet him. The owner filled me in. His dog carried around THREE 45. cal slugs. From the five that hit him. AND HE LIVED!!! Neighbor shot him through their common back fence while drugged out…
I’m helping my pal, Phil Townsend, on a telephone install for a jewelry store on Sunset Blvd., just before the border of Beverly Hills. I usually don’t do installation, but, repair was slow, so, dispatch sent me to help Phil knock out this phone system swap. All the wire was in place, it was to be a piece of cake…Phil meets me at the security buzz in. Its a glass anti room to hold back robbers. Right. These jewelry guys also had a big German Shepherd in the rear of the store you accessed through a secondary buzzer. This dog was supposed to be locked in a storage room while we did the install. It got out, just after I arrived. It went right for Phil, sitting on a plastic milk crate, wiring jacks behind the main glass counter. It bit him right in the crotch. Phil smacked the dog on its head with a ten button call director, making it let loose and run down a hallway behind us…Phil kept his jewels, and, picked up a nice check for ten grand later…
It’s early in the seventies, I just got off my cycle at Formosa garage, working cable maintenance for Pac Bell. A foreman tells me to report to an address on Wilshire Blvd, pronto. I hop right in my tower truck, roll for address. Turns out, ten other guys, plus me and tons of foremen, are looking for manhole covers. Yep. The four hundred pound ones with the forged grids on them. Seems our cable guys pulling new cable, vault to vault on Wilshire at four in the morning, went to a coffee shop to goof for awhile. With all the packing out of the big steel conduits running to each cable vault, all’s it took was a little old man’s stogie, flicked into an open manhole as he finished walking his dog. The La Brea tar pits subterranean gasses, blew covers all the way down to La Cienega…We found all but three…
So I’m doing a phone disconnect for some animal trainers in Simi hills. Neighbors complained about noise, smells. I tell the owner the same thing had happened to my Uncle, Melvin Koontz, and all his MGM lions. As I’m boxing his phones, a man walks by with a friendly looking black bear on a leash. It also has a muzzle and its claws have been blunted. I say on off hand, “Sort of an overkill for such a small bear isn’t it?” The trainer stops, says, “He’s our wrestling bear, want to try him out?” I had wrestled a little in high school. Actually, very little. Tossed off the team for screwing around. I drop my phone tools, get out onto this big mat, get in my stance. Off comes the leash. The bear stands up. I go for the easy take down. Nope. The bear gets me in a hug, falls on me with 500lbs. My contacts explode off my eyes, my bladder goes too. The bear wins. In thirty seconds…
So, here I am at Stevie Wonder’s house again. Nope, in the half dozen times I did repair there, never met him. I knew his gigantic Harlequin Great Danes real well though, from the first visit after they had tossed an all nighter party. People were still crashed all over the place. Sofas, chairs, the floor. Two maids were busy cleaning up all the wreckage. A ten button wall phone had been torn off the kitchen wall. No big deal. As I set my tool case down, these big dogs scared the crap out of me, bounding into the kitchen through the garage. I froze like a rusted tin man. One maid said, “Feed ’em this bone here, they’ll love ‘ya for evah!” I took the bone. Both dogs would have jumped off the Empire State building for that bone. I chuck it far into the vast living room. People are yelling and cursing the dogs. I knew a good thing when I saw it. I reached into the sink, grabbed about five big rib bones, tossed them through the doorway. Pandemonium. I snap the cover back on the wall phone base, now reset with new anchor bolts, slide out the back door. I escape…
Here I am, an Idiot/Savant, being asked my opinion on what in the hell is going on around L.A. I’d say I lean more towards the Idiot part of that equation, but, I do gossip with a lot of old timers, and once in awhile, younger bulls. Here’s the lowdown. It’s positioning. Hey, you can do it too. Figure out future growth, buy up land in the surrounding areas. What’s the big deal? Well, the big deal is the difference between BUYING, and TAKING. Now, my tower is gone. Sob, wail. BIG DEAL. I’m just pissed my material was destroyed. That too is now a dead horse, well whipped, so, let’s move on…I need more beams and utility poles. Good ones still viable…Hey! A MATERIAL LIST!…A good utility pole has to be free of these defects. Especially if over seventy foot long…No major splits. No rotted spots. No bends or twists past six inches from top to bottom. No knots that affect integrity. No creosote. No insect infestation…On slow days for Pacific Telephone, the Foremen would give guys five pound stepping hammers, hand them an area off of Mulholland or Benedict Canyon, tell them to go inspect poles. Now, lots of guys blew it off and sucked down brews at Barneys Beanery. At the end of the day, who was the wiser? Well, for one, that Foreman. If that pole fell into a kitchen and killed someone, or, went down across Laurel canyon, well, guess who’s name popped up on the inspection report. Now, a rogue pole is nothing to sneeze at…If a ninety foot pole goes down, get ready for some real problems, FAST. What will also go is the strand wire. That’s the continuous wrapped wire that holds the actual cable onto all the poles, for MILES. If that baby snaps, say, from the two thousand pound pole going down into a canyon full of expensive homes, OH MAN! That bastard can go like a 5,000 pound Anaconda right through a house, taking the roof right off. And its not close to stopping. Then it will whip back and really show some carnage. We saw films of tests done by Bell Labs and Western Electric about what some poles had done, all over the world. AWESOME! As long as your family wasn’t the star of said film. Oh, I almost forgot. Those big high power transformers are usually come down too. The fun just never stops…
Santa Barbara
What a suck ass town. I helped a pal build a deck there once. They charged my buddy more for the engineering fees, the permits, the soil tests, water flow studies and such, he spent over a hundred grand on it after they busted him for adding taller railings and made him redo the plans. Later, when I was loaned to that area to work on the mayor’s office phones for Pac Bell, I even charged them nine cents each for individual screws that held the jacks on the wall…
My wife says to me, “How do you know what to write?” I say, “Its not what to write, its what not to write!” If I wrote every story that I remembered I’d be tossed off this deal in five seconds. Huh? You say. Lets see now, what just popped into my head. Hmm. A song on the radio can set me off down memory lane. Gee, ‘Money, money’, made a memory lane come to pass. It made me think of, ‘THE GLORY HOLE’. In phone man terms, a DBA. That means, the job your being dispatched to, is so DISGUSTING, they give it a fake name under, Doing Business As, to fake you out into taking said repair ticket. Hence, a DBA. If you knew you were going to a gay bar that specialized in old fags getting T-bagged, why, you just might find a way not to go to said business. Plus, the telephone equipment is mounted in the mens room ceiling accessed by a pull down ladder. Since its a gay bar, BOTH restrooms are for men. Naturally, the one that was for women is used by the cross dressers. Both have glory holes, so, be ready. These type places are where I would use my secret weapon to avoid contact with crazed inhabitants. No matter what drug these nuts were on, I was protected. My big container of fake boogers, given to me by the master mask maker at Hollywood Toy. Just pop on of the fake rubber sticky snots into your mustache, and PRESTO! Your an instant pariah. I always stuck one on the back of my hand to give me the, ‘Hick just wiped his nose on is hand’, look. I’ve found over the years its the little things that make life more interesting…