Memories of An Aspiring Phone Phreak

My memories of radio are tangled up with the shenanigans I pulled playing around on phone lines and my love for the original Doctor Who series. I first saw Doctor Who when I was ten years old and I was mesmerized by the stories and the sounds.

            All those sounds in the show were the product of the Radiophonic Workshop at the BBC. In 1958 an inspired woman named Daphne Oram helped to found this early electronic music studio under the auspices of the British Broadcasting Corporation. She had been inspired to explore electronics when she heard about experiments taking place at the Radiodiffusion Television Francois by Pierre Schaeffer with musique concrète, that is the manipulation of prerecorded sounds on lathe cut records and magnetic tape. But Oram had also been inspired by a prophetic book written by Francis Bacon in 1626 called The New Atlantis and had tacked a passage from it onto the wall of the music studio as a kind of mission statement for the work they would pursue.

            Hands down, the most famous musical creation from the Radiophonic Workshop is the theme song for Doctor Who. Delia Derbyshire was the electronic musician who realized the score for this innovative song, recording sounds made on audio oscillators onto tape, and editing those tapes and layering them up to build the memorable song. Doctor Who gave me my first taste of electronic music and I fell in love for life.

​            I became so obsessed with Doctor Who as a young kid, that if my family was invited out to dinner at another family’s house on a Saturday night, I would try to connive a way for us to get home by 10 PM so I could tune into the show. Doctor Who aired on Channel 48 WCET, a PBS station, and when they had their periodic pledge drive they would put the telephone number out on the TV and have people call in to pledge their support. I was so obsessed, I would get irritated with the announcers when they cut the show off in the middle to stop and ask for money. 

I called the pledge drive number, just to see what would happen, even though, as a ten year old I had no money. The phone rang and a few seconds later and I could hear it ring over the television.

            This gave me a thrill like no other, hearing something I did cause a sound to be heard on our TV set. So, I called it again and again on multiple pledge drives. I did start feeling guilty about doing that, especially when the announcer on the TV would say, “and we have another call, a pledge of support for Doctor Who!”

            I kept on doing this on every pledge drive until I got old enough to fear getting caught in my early teens.

​That time period, in the late 80s and into the early 90s, was also the last golden era for making prank phone calls. Caller ID wasn’t yet prominent, and many people still didn’t know you could dial *69 to see who called last. Playing on the phone was a good way to pass the time, and it became a bit more intense for me in the seventh grade after I read a book by cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling called The Hacker Crackdown. It introduced me to the concept of phone phreaking. Before hackers learned to infiltrate computer systems with their modems over the phone lines, phone phreaks figured out ways to make free calls and otherwise explore Ma Bell’s network of wires. I found the prospect of being able to do this very inspiring and tried to learn how to do it myself, though resources were scant, and I had missed the heyday of phone phreaking by over a decade.

​As a thirteen year old most of my attempts at phone phreaking were actually just phone pranking. I’m surprised I didn’t get in more trouble from my exploits than I did. But I did get in trouble, and I probably should have gotten in more trouble than I did. One weekend when I was skateboarding with a cousin in his neighborhood of Green Hills, I spotted a phone lineman’s handset, near one of those green phone boxes you see in the burbs. It had been left behind and there was no one in sight, no van from Cincinnati Bell anywhere nearby. So I took it, and justified my taking it by saying I had found, which I had. Finders keepers and all of that. It turned out the case not only had a linemans phone with wire clippers for testing the lines, but it also had a little computer in it that you could hook up to a phone jack and use to make calls. For some reason I thought you would be able to get free calls using this because it belonged to the phone company, and who would charge them?  I was spending the night at my cousins that weekend, and his parents left on a date after ordering us some pizza. I convinced him that we should call up some of these 1-800 numbers I had seen on late night TV for something called “Chat lines.” Apparently, if you called these numbers, and yes, they really were 1-800 numbers, there would be an eager young woman eager to talk to you on the other end. I convinced my cousin that because we were using the handset from Cincinnati Bell, we wouldn’t get charged. I was wrong, and needless to say, when his parents got the phone bill, they weren’t too happy. 

Later, another friend of mine figured out that the little computer included in the lineman’s set had a modem inside and it could be used to dial into the Bulletin Board System that were around before the internet as we know it today existed. We dialed into some Bulletin Boards and poked around and had some fun. Then one day, when I came home from school, I got scolded by my mom, before I’d even had a chance to do anything wrong. The security department from Cincinnati Bell had visited our house and had asked if anyone had a lineman’s set. My mom had seen me using it, even though I had tried to keep it hidden. Apparently every time a call was placed with this box, it sent out a trace signal back to the Bell HQ. They wanted their equipment back, and they came and got it, and that ended my fun with that bit of equipment. I’m actually glad I was at school when it happened, but that kind of ended my career as an aspiring phone phreak, though not as a phone pranker. Meanwhile my love for the stories about the phone phreaks who could whistle tones at the right frequency into the phone and enter Ma Bell through the back door never disappeared.

​Around the same time all of this was happening, I had became enamored with the community radio station WAIF 88.3 FM. In the sixth grade I started to call in to one of their summer talk-shows so I could hear my voice come back over the air. They didn’t have any way of screening their calls, so they didn’t know it was just going to be some bored kid. Hearing my voice come back over the radio, usually with feedback, because I had failed to turn down my own radio, never stopped being exciting. Then, towards the end of high school, I discovered the Art Damage program. This was a revelation in terms of audio and what can be done with sound. It turned me on to the music of Sun Ra, Nurse With Wound, John Cage, and dozens of other artists I was only just then getting a clue about. It also did the essential work of cuing me into what was going on here just below the radar in Cincinnati. Just as I had with Doctor Who, I became obsessed with Art Damage and tuned whenever I could, and taped the programs off the air so I could listen back to the cassettes later.

Location of the original WAIF studios at the Alms apartment building. The radio tower is still located there, but the studio is a few blocks away.

Eventually I got onto radio in a legitimate way, but was still quite illegal. This happened during my brief tenure as a student at Antioch College on their pirate FM station Anti-Watt. Anti-Watt covered the village of Yellow Springs and I had my own show called The Psychedelicatessin on the station with a few friends. It was a free-form radio show of live collage music inspired by the experimental group Negativland and their radio show Over The Edge. At college I was more interested in hanging out at the radio station, the recording studio, and my job there at the student library than I was in my classes, so I eventually did the smart thing and dropped out. I had always been a big reader, and a writer. The problem with college was I wanted to read lots of the books I was finding in the library that weren’t assigned to me in class, and I wanted to write about things that also weren’t part of those same assignments. The copious amounts of weed I smoked back then might have also had something to do with it.
            After I dropped out of college, I came back home, got a job at the public library, which allowed me to continue my autodidact education, and I promptly began my life as a bohemian. I started going to noise music shows, poetry readings and art openings. I made zines, wrote poetry and essays. I got involved at WAIF and became a programmer for the longstanding experimental music show Art Damage after I met some people who were involved in that scene through my job. Later I joined the team of the more eclectic On the Way to the Peak of Normal. All told I was on the air regularly between 2001 and 2014. Now I am an occasional programmer for my friend Ken Katkin on his show Trash Flow Radio, when he needs to get away for the weekend.
            When I left WAIF I thought I would use my new free time to devote to writing, but I found I actually couldn’t quit radio. I had always been interested in shortwave radio and ham radio which I’d been exposed to from my great grandpa and the Boy Scouts. I had met a ham radio operator on the bus and he told me about classes being offered by the local Oh-Ky-In Amateur Radio Society and I decided to go ahead and take the test and get my license from the Federal Communications Commission as part of my general obsession with radio and alternative forms of communication. Through the web of connections available in the friendly ham and shortwave communities I met Pete Polyank who introduced me to Frederick Moe and it has been one of my supreme delights to participate in his projects, such as Free Radio Skybird and Imaginary Stations.
             I did end up putting more time into my writing, and my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory became a way for me to explore all of these different interests, neigh, obsessions with telephony, radio and music as it explores interconnected history between radio, the phone system and how research into speech synthesis at Bell Telephone Laboratories gave rise to electronic music as a happy by-product.
            Time keeps on moving, and I still try to bring a bohemian attitude to my life. Some things are just more important than having a better paying job. Things like radio, like friendship, like literature, like family. It’s not always easy to balance interests, let alone obsessions, with the day to day duties and chores of daily life. But balance is overrated, and I’ve found, at least for me, it works better if I weave these things into my life. After all, they are not separate from who I am and what I do. As time keeps moving on, and no TARDIS in sight to help me rewind or fast forward, I hope to continue to weave my inclinations towards the three R’s -reading, writing, and radio- into a life interfused with friendship and family.

This article originally appeared in Frederick Moe's Radio e-APA.