by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

I'm a sucker for an old-fashioned Montreal rustic pay phone, made of wood with a door and a bench. It's like your own tiny cottage in the city without the plumbing headaches. The French even call payphones cabines téléphoniques, which I would imagine translates as Telephone Country Houses.

There's a joy to talking in these booths, whereas there's something gimpy and perverted about cell phones, which turn people into verbal exhibitionists blabbering on with their meaningless trivial chatter while picking through the limes at the fruit store.

The city got its first pay phone in 1899, at Nicholl's Drug Store at Bleury and Ste-Catherine. Few old-style booths survive. Verres Sterilisés bar on Rachel has a pair, as do a few local hospitals, including the Royal Victoria.

Our best phone booths sat side-by-side in city hall, tucked into the white marble wall in the lobby. A few weeks ago, officials yanked the devices out. The city blames Bell Canada. Bell blames the city.

They've replaced the phones with a wheelchair-friendly phone stuck gaudily onto a nearby wall.

The decline of the phone booth started when Bell disabled incoming calls to outmanoeuvre scamsters receiving collect calls that went unpaid.

A phone call cost big money until recently. Back in the '80s, when A Flock of Seagulls recorded "Telecommunication," a phone call to India cost $4 a minute, about minimum wage at the time, and yet the connection was invariably almost inaudible.

The battle against phoney collect calls led Bell to load the last four digits of a phone booth number with telltale nines and zeros. Prior to every collect call, operators would call another operator at Rates and Routes and ask them to "check for coin." The other operator would flip through a big book to ensure the call wasn't destined for a booth. "Not a coin," they'd usually reply.

A few pay phones still magically received calls, including one at the Westmount Tavern on St-Jacques and Greene, now a dentist's office.

Until well past the mid-'80s, mobile phones were only in cars. Operators on the fifth floor of the downtown Bell Canada building on Belmont would answer with a cord in the wall, write down the request, dial the number and time the call.

Now every idiot blabs endlessly on a cell phone, oblivious to the arcane traditions.

What are they talking about? Nothing. I heard thousands of phone conversations during my years working with the hearing impaired. For every oddball lamenting his inability to pick up other men at small-town donut shops, you get a dozen excruciatingly dull mother-and-daughter chats, rivalled in their boringness only by lover-talk.

So pay phones are on their way out. Bell owns 85,000 in Quebec and Ontario. Phone booth profits are declining 10 per cent annually. They pulled out about 12,000 phones between '99 and '02 and are still undoubtedly doing it, but they're not telling.

The extinction of wooden phone cabins is done, the disappearance of pay phones is next.

You could be Verdun's mayor: As municipal parties slowly unveil candidates for $60,000-a-year city councillor jobs, I've been conducting a secret campaign to encourage interesting characters to run for office.

Renegade ex-con and boxer Alex Hilton would look good in Verdun. He was working at Ma's Fish and Chips on Church. His wife ran a Chinese restaurant nearby, but they seem to have temporarily disappeared.

There are openings aplenty in Verdun. Mayor Georges Bossé and his longtime colleague Laurent Dugas are both retiring. Fellow warhorse John Gallagher is thinking about setting off into the sunset.

I fear they'll be replaced by robotic technocrats with personality deficits.

We need to return to folksy Camillien-Houde-style weirdocrats who'd crack jokes non-stop, make the occasional spicy quip or hit on your wife.

Nuns' Island councillor Claude Trudel is an old friend of Mayor Tremblay's and he wants in as Verdun borough mayor, but it's whispered he might not sell on the gritty mainland. So perhaps it's time for you to step up.

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca