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Sam Hartnett ©️ Seven Days Patrick Schlott with one of his free phones in Randolph
We’ve all been disconnected: dropped calls, voices cutting out, stalled texts. It can happen often in central Vermont, where the hilly rural landscape doesn’t lend itself to consistent cell reception. In some spots, such as the tiny village of North Tunbridge, your phone becomes a paperweight — no connection at all.
Except: On the porch of the North Tunbridge General Store, next to a board covered with flyers for farmers markets and bluegrass shows, hangs a 20th-century black box — a pay telephone. Not only is it a working pay phone, but it’s also free, no coins needed. A push-button device that’s now as uncommon as a black-and-white TV offers villagers or those passing through a way to call for a tow or check whether bread is on the shopping list.
“Oh, sure. Every day, usually at least one person uses it,” store proprietor Lois Gross said from behind the register one day last month.
The phone’s vintage exterior is misleading. Its innards connect to the internet to make calls, all thanks to Patrick Schlott, a Randolph electrical engineer who repurposes old pay phones to bridge the gap in rural communication. At a time when pay telephones have all but disappeared from the U.S., Schlott’s company, RandTel, offers a grassroots alternative for connection in a smartphone-driven world.
“We still have a certain population of people who reside in a place with no cell service,” said Hunter Thompson, director of telecommunications and connectivity for the state Department of Public Service. “I think what Mr. Schlott is doing is wonderful.”
Schlott, 31, is just old enough to have used the pay phones in downtown Montpelier when he was growing up. He created RandTel, his one-man operation, with his own money and as a hobby — an outgrowth of his fondness for tinkering and old-school technology.
A couple of years ago, Schlott came across a telephone handset in his parents’ garage, most likely a relic from his uncle’s days working at AT&T, when the Bell telephone system ruled American telecommunications. It was a space-saver phone without a dial, designed for receiving calls on a factory floor or other such duties. Schlott realized he had all the parts needed to put together an analog phone. Then, he learned from a friend about an analog-to-digital phone adapter.
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Sam Hartnett ©️ Seven Days The RandTel phone at the North Tunbridge General Store
RandTel has installed three resurrected phones so far — the others are in Thetford and Randolph — each using an internet connection to make calls through an adapter that converts POTS (plain old telephone service) signals into digital ones. Schlott pays for the calls at a cost of less than a penny a minute. He also staffs an operator line through his personal cellphone, from which he can redirect calls and help people find the information they need. Dial “0” from a RandTel phone if you’re looking to get in touch.
His research on resurrecting pay phones led him to a pair of innovative free calling services: Philadelphia-based PhilTel and Futel in Portland, Ore., two collectives that install and operate similar phones in their cities. Unhoused residents are often the users, as Futel intended, because denial of phone service “has long been a tactic used against undesirable populations, and our devices will counteract that,” the organization’s website says.
Schlott’s phones are located in rural areas and will likely see less use than those in urban centers. But he thinks they offer an important value to the community. The only other traditional pay phones registered in Vermont are located in a select few state parks.
“It’s getting harder and harder, if not already impossible, to exist in modern society without having a smartphone,” he said. “It’s expected that you have something that can provide you communication, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.”
“What I’m doing is attempting to bridge the communications gap for, let’s say, less-than-privileged populations,” Schlott said. “The urban areas are more likely to get high-speed connectivity these days than the rural areas, and they’re left behind.”
There’s a different kind of access challenge in the village of Thetford. The local middle/high school, Thetford Academy, was one of the first Vermont schools to ban cellphones for students during the school day.
Some parents, who had heard about RandTel from local news coverage, approached Holly Lague, director of the nearby Latham Memorial Library, to see if one of the phones could be installed there for kids who needed to call home. They didn’t want their kids to grow up with their faces buried in a screen but still wanted to keep in contact with them. Soon, Schlott had installed a repurposed push-button pay phone on the library’s back porch.
“There was a kid over here from one of the summer camps or another that called his dad from the phone this morning,” Lague said as she staffed the circulation desk one afternoon last month. “It’s really nice to know that word has gotten out and it’s been useful for people.”
The librarian said she appreciates the novelty of a pay phone for younger users. Many of them are interested in how the old technology works and enjoy showing their friends.
The phone with push-button numbers has also revealed a gap in kids’ knowledge — they haven’t memorized phone numbers, since their cellphones store them. So the RandTel phone offers a learning opportunity, Lague said: “It’s really good to teach them certain numbers that are important for you to know.”
The library has a backup generator that can keep the Wi-Fi on for six hours during a power outage. Lague recalled one person who was headed to a meeting when she got a flat tire and found she had left her cellphone at home. The library was closed, but the RandTel phone was there for her.
“Our daughter has used it quite a few times, like if she plans to stay at the library until 4 but wants to come home earlier,” said Audrey Leitao, a Thetford parent.
The Thetford RandTel phone lets kids stay away from screens while maintaining the safety of being one phone call away, according to Schlott.
“It’s there 24 hours a day, any time that kids need to make a call for whatever reason,” he said. “I think one of the kids there ordered a pizza with it.”
Country Communication
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Sam Hartnett ©️ Seven Days The RandTel phone at Latham MemorialLibrary in Thetford
Even as the nationwide cell network has grown, many service providers don’t have an economic incentive to build cell towers for a relatively small number of residents who live in signal-blocking terrain, such as the area surrounding North Tunbridge.
Lois and Mike Gross reopened the village’s nearly 200-year-old general store in 2022, after it had sat idle for four years. One summer morning, they arrived to find a woman across the road sleeping on a picnic table. She had gotten in a tiff with her partner while camping in nearby Royalton and was attempting to walk to her home more than 20 miles north. The Grosses let her use the store’s phone to call for a ride. When Schlott approached the couple the next summer with the idea for installing the first RandTel phone, the Grosses recalled that situation and figured it could help in similar ones.
Schlott replaced the original instruction card on the 1990s-era pay phone with one tailored to RandTel and the area. It displays numbers for a local towing business and the post office, along with instructions for using the phone (for those who don’t remember how).
“The main reason it’s here is not for the store; it’s for the community,” Mike Gross said. “Sometimes people need to call if they’ve broken down.” The Grosses provide the phone with electricity and internet, and Schlott handles the rest.
A few miles to the west of North Tunbridge, just off Exit 4 on Interstate 89 in Randolph, an unstaffed information booth sits on the greenbelt of a McDonald’s parking lot. Inside, a visitor can find tourist pamphlets and Schlott’s most striking relic: a telephone with a rotary dial straight out of the 1950s.
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Sam Hartnett ©️ Seven Days A list of helpful numbers on a RandTel phone
Lift the phone receiver to your ear and a dial tone hums nostalgically. The rotary dial is as smooth as ever, elegantly gliding back to its original position after each number. But there’s no nostalgia in the guts of the phone: The lockbox where coins would drop so many years ago now houses technology turning analog calls to digital, powered by a solar panel atop the booth.
Although the area does have cell service, this phone still sees use, Schlott said, primarily by people leaving the interstate to visit Randolph or nearby towns.
The White River Valley Chamber of Commerce, which runs the booth, sees value in the public telephone — in part as a tourist attraction — that might inspire other such phones.
“I hope it grows. I hope he is inspired to go mainstream or public and do more of them,” said Andrea Easton, a member of the Chamber’s board of directors. “It’s good for emergencies, of course, and it opens up the idea that these things can be reused.” Easton said she and a friend were willing to be operators should RandTel install more phones.
Schlott can’t easily do that. In addition to managing RandTel’s current phones, he has a day job as a manufacturing engineer at Beta Technologies, and he and his wife recently had a baby.
Nevertheless, Schlott said he’s thinking about how to scale up RandTel if he can, putting more phones in places such as libraries and general stores, where the devices might be most useful to the surrounding communities.
His motivation hasn’t flagged. “I’m fighting back against the society that forces us to own smartphones and then be addicted to social media and stuff as a side effect,” he said.
“It’s cool to be able to use these things to maybe hint at the idea of building a world where we don’t need to have smartphones,” he added. “That’s a pretty lofty goal. But, I mean, this is a start.”
In Middletown Springs, Residents Still Let Their Fingers Do the Walking
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A print phone book might seem useless nowadays. But Middletown Springs, in Rutland County, still creates a town phone book — a cherished project that solidifies neighborly connections on paper.
The Middletown Springs Telephone & Business Directory: 10th Edition is organized into three sections: residents’ phone listings; businesses’ operating hours and contact information; and paid advertisements — around $100 for a full page, and $50 for a half page — that fund the project.
“It has emergency numbers, town numbers and hours of operation. Those themselves are quite handy,” said Maria Riley, who volunteers her design skills for the book.
In the early days, the phone book was simpler. With landlines, everyone had the same first three digits after the area code. Residents were only listed by their last four numbers. The advent of cellphones, with variable numbers, called for a slight redesign.
“To get everybody, when we started out, our postmistress would go through the directory and help us with our names,” said Leslie Silver, a member of a town planning commission subcommittee. “And a lister knew everybody in town; we would use people who knew people who moved to town.”
Silver and fellow subcommittee member Kimberly Bushnell started the project in 2000. A new edition of the book comes out every few years; 2022-2024 was the 10th edition, and another is in the works.
Each household in town, population 800, is mailed a copy of the 34-page pamphlet. Silver and Riley haven’t encountered anyone who objects to being included. “We’ve got just about everybody in town we can find,” Silver said.
Many residents use the business section daily for things such as checking the hours of the post office or the library.
“Other towns over time had asked us about it, someone in Chittenden, and I think Wallingford,” Silver said. But the town’s neighbors have yet to follow through with their own phone directories.
Editor’s note: Sam Hartnett’s work is supported by the University of Vermont’s Community News Service summer reporting program.