A bit of history, both political and technical, is taking shape in the State House, courtesy of one of the state’s most unusual museums.
An old telephone booth that once stood in the Highway Hotel in Concord has been loaned by the New Hampshire Telephone Museum in Warner and has been installed outside the Executive Council chambers, complete with a candlestick telephone.
It won’t be functional – no jokes about elderly legislators’ preference for old technology, please – but will eventually let the public pick up the earpiece and hear a recorded message from Gov. Sununu, giving them a chance to reminisce about the days when phones couldn’t fit in your pocket and you had to ask the operator to connect you.
The phone booth was once in the New Hampshire Highway Hotel, which was a centerpiece of first-in-the-nation primaries for four decades before being demolished in 1988 and eventually replaced by stores opposite Fort Eddy Plaza. The hotel hosted scores of presidential campaigns and became part of the state’s political lore so it’s possible that Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy or Ronald Reagan once made a call from inside the booth – not likely, but you never know.
The booth was given to the museum by a patron. It ended up in the State House as a result of a comment made by Sununu while visiting the New Hampshire Telephone Museum last fall, said Laura French, executive director of the museum.
“He said ‘I’ve always wanted to get a phone booth in the State House’, and I said, ‘Well, it just so happens we have one’,” French said. “He thought it would be a cool idea.”
The booth had been stored in the museum’s basement, awaiting repair and eventual placement.
“We weren’t sure what we were going to do with it. When you move one of those, you have to make sure it’s where you want it. They’re not easy to move,” French said.
Wednesday’s installation was overseen by two museum members with long experience in the telephone industry: 48 years for Brian Lovell and 60 for Clarke Kidder. Both men got into the business early – Lovell had relatives working for phone companies and says he wanted to be “a telephone guy” from childhood, while Kidder had a high school guidance counselor who pointed him to an AT&T job – and ended up with TDS Telecom, the successor to Merrimack County Telephone as well as several other formerly independent phone companies in New Hampshire.
Industry connections are common at the Telephone Museum, which opened in 2005 and was started with the collection of phone paraphernalia collected by Alderic “Dick” Violette, the chairman of Merrimack County Telephone. French, for example, worked in the phone industry before becoming museum director in 2012.
“This is a fun exhibit,” French said of the installation. “There’s a lot of people that just can’t understand why there is a Telephone Museum, which we say, ‘Why not?’ But you know, we try to make it unique and fun.”
