Phone booth, Corner West Adams and Arlington

Who has a phone booth by their front door?  Where do you even see a phone booth anymore?  You wonder about that.  You stop and take a picture with your phone so you can check it out later. [See: West Adams]

The house, on a corner lot, was built for a music-store mogul named Fitzgerald circa 1904 (okay - some say 1903 and others say 1906, whatever) designed in a mixed style of Gothic and Queen Anne by noted architect of the era Joseph C. Newsom.  By World War II the neighborhood had changed and the house had become a retirement home for old movie stars.  By the 70s a group of vaudeville and circus performers owned it.  In 1977 a lady named Arlillian Moody bought the place, renamed it Elegant Manor and operated a sort of community center, catering business and half-way house here, hosting weddings and the occasional film crew shoot and fraternity parties and even AA meetings, which surely helps explain the phone booth out front.  When you've got a bunch of drunks showing up for meetings you definitely need a public phone.  Or you used to, back in the days when people had pagers instead of i-Phones. 

When I first moved to L.A. -- a long time ago -- I met my friend Frank and we went to the gym.  Or I went to the gym and made friends with Frank, one or the other.  In any case it was the middle of the day, and I knew why I could be at the gym at that hour -- I was an unemployed writer.  Or I was unemployed but I thought I could be a writer.  I had heard that in L.A. there were half-hour writers and hour writers, so I was optimistic.  With my midwestern Protestant work ethic I was prepared, if necessary, to write all day.

But what were all these other people doing at the gym during normal business hours?  Didn't they work?  Were they all writers?  Did anyone work in L.A..?  I asked Frank, who promptly grabbed my hand and a copy of a local free weekly and marched me down to the public phone booth near the front desk, and after he made me get him a few dollars worth of quarters, he flipped to the "personal service ads" in the back of the paper and started dialing. 

Moments later, like a distant flock of bleating sheep or a multitude of tiny car alarms, pagers started going off all over the gym, in the weight room, in the locker room, in the sauna.  By the time Frank was finished, there was a very long line behind us of impatient patrons waiting to use the phone.

"I rest my case," announced Frank as he hung up, having established not only the purpose of pagers and public phones and personal ads but also the way in which, if you were the entrepreneurial and good-looking type, you could go to the gym in the middle of the afternoon and still, technically, be working.

Frank also taught me that "Call your Sponsor" is something you say to a person who is acting crazy.  Even if you don't know the person, Frank told me, and just ran into him on the street or at Starbucks, the odds are, if he (or she, but usually women know better) is being difficult and argumentative ("Restless, Irritable and Discontent" is how Frank put it), then the guy (gal) needs to talk to a professional. 

The Fitzgerald house -- Elegant Manor -- is currently on the market for $1.9 million.  Six bedrooms, two baths. [Source -- including some fairly snarky comments].   The place needs work.  The world has changed.  No one has pagers, for one thing.  But you get your very own phone booth, right out front.  Call me.