The Colossal Payphone

Eleven feet of enameled steel handset, laid flat across two masonry piers, serves as the principal public bench of downtown Latch Creek, and has since the Latch Valley Telephone Cooperative erected the full structure — a payphone roughly two stories tall, beige and navy in the cooperative's colors — as an advertisement in 1989. The keypad is painted on; the cord, a run of flexible conduit thick as a culvert, is real, and is inspected. The coin return, a hinged steel door at knee height, functions as the town's lost-and-found; the cooperative's successor office empties it Mondays and logs the contents in a ledger said to run back to 1991. Unconfirmed but persistent is the claim that the pedestal housed a working line until the 2003 merger, and that the number is still assigned. The office that could settle this keeps counter hours that did not overlap with the correspondent's visit.