Off the Wall

A coin telephone presents a challenge that Harvard freshmen cannot seem to resist. Last winter, students in Holworthy Hall pried the telephone away from the wall far enough to manipulate the coin mechanism, get a dial tone without using up their nickels. At Hollis Hall, residents tore a pay station off the wall and hung it on a classmate's door. These maneuvers turned out to be somewhat self-defeating since the New England Telephone & Telegraph Co. removed the phones, but Harvard's freshmen were not discouraged. This spring the residents of venerable, 145-year-old Stoughton Hall achieved marked success with two new methods of outguessing the telephone company.

Method No. 1, used at one of Stoughton's two coin machines, was comparatively rudimentary; the caller dropped in a penny instead of a nickel while pounding the phone with a heavy object to make it give off a convincing ring. (Stoughton men were annoyed last week when newspapers said they hit the phone with a baseball bat--"It was always a brick.") Method No. 2 required more skill; advanced Stoughton men used a knife blade or screw driver to hold a penny in the slot and, with just the right pressure, sent it spinning into the nickel compartment.

A fortnight ago, vexed by its increasing harvest of pennies, the telephone company installed an apparatus that had been represented as a new "spinproof" phone. It was no solution. Stoughton's finer minds soon found how to spin calls as before. On the wall beside the phone they kept a box score of pennies and calls completed. Within a few days the calls ran to more than a hundred and one forehanded genius was practicing spinning nickels into the quarter slot in preparation for a call to his home in Texas.

Last week the New England Telephone & Telegraph Co. bowed to such ingenuity, took out Stoughton's phones, too.

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