In some circles back home in Fullerton, Nebraska the "Phone Booth Story" became legend.
As it often happens, and it did in this case, a tale can take some bizarre twists as it travels from one ear to another. But I'm going to clear things up and tell the story the way it really took place.
I remember it well. And I should. As it turned out, it was my first brush with the police.
Every small town has its "characters," usually colorful folks who, for one reason or another, stand out from the crowd. Helen Harper was one such citizen. The main reason she stood out was because she weighed upwards of 400 pounds. There was a lot to stand out.
Helen once paid a visit to our town doctor and he ordered a physical exam. They needed to record her weight, so they sent Helen down to the grain elevator. It was the only place in Fullerton where there was a scale that would support her.
I would guess that Helen, at that time, was somewhere around 35 (which also happened to be her shoe size). She was married to a wiry little man in his 70s and they had at least eight children. She could have been hiding at least one or two more. Helen always looked like she was about to give birth to octuplets.
And talk about pushing her weight around. Rare was the person who messed with Helen.
Bell Telephone tried it. Helen was behind in paying her bill, so her phone was disconnected.
Take that, Helen! Yeah, right.
Upon discovering why her phone didn't work (I wonder if they called her to tell her she had no phone service), Helen ripped the telephone off the kitchen wall and wildly drove her blue Plymouth station wagon downtown to Ma Bell's business office where she slammed the phone down on the manager's desk, and told him quite plainly where he could stick his dial tone.
And that is where the Phone Booth Story begins.
It took place on a summer evening back in 1968. There were four of us young men who had wandered downtown, probably to get a Coke at Clara's Cafe, then to walk the small town streets looking for harmless adventures.
We had passed by the telephone company's branch office and turned at the corner where there sat, fittingly, a phone booth. We ventured on about a half block when we stopped and turned. The blue Plymouth station wagon had driven by and pulled up to the curb on the corner.
Helen Harper jiggled out from the driver's side and headed for the phone booth. Without phone service at home, this was her only alternative if she wanted to place a call.
Our curiosity got the best of us. We were extremely interested to see how this woman was going to fit into that phone booth. We figured it was worth watching. After all, teen aged boys will be boys.
Helen pushed on the glass doors and began stuffing herself inside the booth, filling every square inch. It reminded me of that famous old college prank where fraternity brothers would see how many of them could fit inside a phone booth. With just Helen in there by herself, it looked like the entire university.
What happened next was totally unrelated to our mission and, to three of us in our group, totally without reason. But, as Helen dropped in her dime and began dialing, one fellow among us, on a strange and fateful impulse, reached down and, in one fluid motion, scooped up a handful of gravel from the parking lot where we were standing. He reared back and let the rocks fly in the direction of the phone booth.
My two innocent cohorts and I stood frozen, watching in amazement. It unfolded like a slow motion movie. The spray of gravel pummeled the phone booth and that was followed by the sound of breaking glass. We could actually see the glass shatter and hear the bellowing of the woman inside the booth.
Suddenly we unfroze and began running. That's what level-headed teenagers do when they smell fear. They run like panic-stricken dogs.
After a couple of blocks, we stopped to gather our wits and three of us asked the perpetrator why he had suddenly decided to kill Helen. He had no reasonable answer. So we figured, he's on his own. We went our way and he went home.
The rest of the evening passed uneventfully. Later, we couldn't help returning to the scene of the crime. I guess we wanted to make sure there was no blood. Fortunately there wasn't, although glass was everywhere (along with four or five candy bar wrappers) and there was no sign of the station wagon.
The next evening, I was over to the house of one of the friends who had been with me the night before. We were alarmed when his dad sought us out and told us that one of our local policeman was in the living room and wanted to question us.
Sam the policeman was an aging, friendly sort and when we walked into the room, it showed in his eyes that he knew we hadn't done anything wrong, but he needed to know who had. He told us that Helen hadn't been injured in the incident the night before, but when he had arrived, she was standing on the corner violently shaking glass out of her big cotton tent of a house dress.
It seemed Helen had spotted a couple of girls across the street from the phone booth. Sam had tracked them down and asked them if they had seen anyone in the vicinity. They obliged and gave Sam our names. So we obliged and gave Sam the name of our friend who had launched the preemptive strike.
Now, come to find out, Sam had already been down to my house, so it wasn't long before my parents showed up to join the festivities. My dad was fit to be tied, mostly because I hadn't already mentioned anything about the previous evening to him.
He explained to me that running away was the worst thing a guy could do in that predicament. Somehow, I begged to differ. I just couldn't feature myself walking up to an angry 400-pound woman covered with shattered glass and saying to her, "Excuse me, but my friend over there took a sudden notion to watch a phone booth implode with you inside and I'll be glad to call a cop and have the lad sent up the river if you'll just promise not to sit on me."
Well, I think I was grounded for a week after that. The boy who threw the rocks had to make restitution. And, fortunately, Helen Harper never found out where I lived.
So, in a nutshell, that's the legendary Phone Booth Story, just the way it happened. And (sorry, Dad) but if I had it to do all over again, I'd still run like hell.
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Copyright 2011 by Wendel Potter
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