Telephone museum is being disconnected History will be giving way to real estate realities

Oleta Porter is curator of the Doc Porter Museum of Telephone History. The museum is named after her late husband, Clyde "Doc" Porter, who is credited with expanding the facility, founded in 1966, to its current size. less Oleta Porter is curator of the Doc Porter Museum of Telephone History. The museum is named after her late husband, Clyde "Doc" Porter, who is credited with expanding the facility, founded in 1966, to its ... more Photo: Melissa Phillip Photo: Melissa Phillip Image 1 of / 8 Caption Close Telephone museum is being disconnected 1 / 8 Back to Gallery

Hello, Central, here's a story of way-back times. Long ago, in the days of wire-based communication, before the cellphone or even the rotary dial, there was the operator. With granite composure and nimble fingers, the switchboard queen calmed emergencies and reunited the long-separated.

For almost 50 years, the operator and her analog world have been celebrated at Houston's telephone museum, a quirky collection of granny-era technology surprising in its ingenuity.

Now, though, the Doc Porter Museum of Telephone History, Houston's switchboard connection to its telephonic past, is going dark. AT&T is selling its building.

"They've told me there's no provision for us," said museum curator Oleta Porter, widow of longtime telephone company employee, Clyde "Doc" Porter, for whom the museum is named. "I expect we'll have to be out by the end of the year."

Real estate agent Michael Hassler said completion of the sale of the building at 1714 Ashland is imminent. The telephone museum, which has occupied various AT&T buildings since its founding in 1966, has filled much of the Houston Heights building's second floor since 1996.

Also affected by the sale are workrooms where volunteers sew "Hug A Bears" for children in traumatic situations and repair audiobook players used by the blind.

The charitable activities and the museum are operated by Telecom Pioneers, an association of retired telecommunications workers.

Relocation challenges

Porter, whose late husband is credited with expanding the museum to its present scope, said she will continue to search for a suitable venue for display of the thousands of artifacts.

South Texas Pioneers President Deberah Joseph, though, said an agreement has been reached with AT&T, which owns many of the objects, to place the collection in storage. Some of the artifacts, which range from wire splicers to switchboards, could be displayed at AT&T buildings, she said.

Alice Aanstoos, the company's regional vice president for external affairs, said only that AT&T is "negotiating" with the Pioneers, and hopes to help resolve the question of what to do with the collection.

Major challenges in relocating the museum exhibits to another local venue are the collection's size - it currently fills almost 7,500 square feet - and the fact that any new location must come, essentially, free. AT&T historically has provided museum space free and paid the electric bill. Joseph said company officials would have to approve a move of AT&T-owned artifacts to a third-party location.

The telephone museum is among the small, volunteer-operated museums that spring up in Houston's residential neighborhoods.

An average 600 people annually tour the museum, which is open to walk-in visitors only on Tuesdays.

On display are switchboards, including a Braille model, and photos of the intrepid women at work. The operator's role as intervenor in completing every call began to wane with the introduction of dial-it-yourself rotary phones in 1919. Telephones with punch-button dials made their appearance on a large scale in the 1960s.

Fashionable phones

The museum's 1876 telephone - Alexander Bell's first - is only a replica, but the exhibit cases are filled with hundreds of genuine phones ranging from the most primitive to iconic Mickey Mouse models.

Augmenting the museum's assemblage of "candlestick" phones is a temporary exhibit of telephone vanities, high-style cabinets that concealed the telephones' inner works for placement in fashionable settings. Among them are early pay phones equipped to accept silver dollars. Visitors embracing the contemporary vogue of telephone conversations as public performance, may be surprised by early 20th-century pay phone booths, double-walled to keep conversations in and outside noises out.

The museum's collections abruptly stop in the mid-1980s with the advent of commercial mobile phones.

"There are no cellphones," Porter said, "We wanted to keep things in the era of wire."

allan.turner@chron.com