Randy began collecting because his wife wanted an old phone for their home. They looked for one and found an old double-box phone. He refinished it and the phone-collecting bug bit.
"It takes approximately eight to 10 hours to refinish a phone," he says. "That means I stain and varnish the wood of the old phone to restore the original deep wood colors and grain." Depending on the phone, Randy repairs it with parts that he picks up at shows like the Abilene event. He aims to restore a phone as close to original condition as possible. Randy usually will buff, shine or replace all external metal parts, but he leaves the internal parts in their original condition, dusting them only for presentation.
His prized display at the Abilene show was a pair of wooden box telephones, perfectly restored. One was a 1904 Williams Telephone & Supply Co. single-box, oak wall phone. It was not for sale, but was valued between $500 and $600. Next to it sat a Williams-Abbot Electric Co. telephone. Also a single-box, this 1905-1906 model was equipped with four station jacks and associated terminals. Looking very progressive for its time, this phone had multiple lines used to juggle multiple calls.
"Hushaphones were amplification modules that amplified a person's voice as they spoke into the phone," explains Derwood Novak of Milan, Mich., who has been collecting since 1959. "The Hushaphone is considered very desirable with collectors. I've seen a couple go on eBay for more than what I'm asking for mine, which is $560."
Derwood, sporting an old-time handlebar mustache, says his collection includes more than 600 antique phones. He keeps them all at home in what he calls his "museum room." A picture he carries of the packed room shows wall-to-wall telephone antiques. "Curiosity made me collect, I guess," Derwood says. "I found my first phones in the trash of the phone company near my house when I was 12. My first one was a Standard Telephone & Electric Co. brand wood model. The Standard has a Milde transmitter, which is very rare."
The rarest phone Derwood ever had in his collection was a 1894 Lockwood wooden model. "I sold it to a gentleman, but he doesn't want me to say for how much," Derwood says. "Let's just say that it was pricey enough."
Candlestick-style phones became popular after the telephone industry began to expand. Technology had advanced, with better-designed receivers and smaller telephones available, and as the number of telephone manufacturers grew, so did the variety of candlestick models on the market.
Nick Kleyweg of Sioux City, Iowa, a candlestick telephone collector, says they're popular in part because of that variety. "Candlesticks are more unique in pattern and style than the wooden box phones, which were built during telephone's infancy and reflect a more utilitarian need for communicating. Aside from the very nice woodwork that is seen on most high-quality wooden phones, the style is drab."
By the turn of the century, more than 222 phone companies were in operation in the United States. To separate their phones from competitors' phones, companies focused on design. As a consequence, people began to buy phones for decorative purposes as well as for communicating. The candlestick became the phone of choice because it could be mass-produced out of cheap or expensive materials, in any shape or size.