Pay Telephones

AT&T Inc. is getting out of the business that gave Agent 86 a cunning way to enter CONTROL headquarters in "Get Smart." The nation's largest phone company said Monday that it would stop owning and operating public pay phones by the end of next year. But that doesn't necessarily mean Superman will have to find a new changing room. San Antonio-based AT&T -- which operates 65,000 pay phones around the country, including 21,000 in California -- will put them up for sale.

Two public telephones in North Hills that were illegally installed and used primarily by drug dealers and prostitutes were removed Monday by city officials, Mayor James K. Hahn announced. The pay phones, located at Parthenia Street and Cedros Avenue near a liquor store and laundermat, were not permitted and were not maintained by any legitimate telephone companies, said Katisha Robinson, a spokeswoman for the mayor. "They were very sophisticated in the way the phones were hooked up," she said.

Night and day, they rush to use "The Phones." Inmates of the Men's Central and Twin Towers jails daydream about being freed and walking about 160 steps to the corner of Vignes and Bauchet streets to make a call on one of the eight most coveted pay phones in all of Los Angeles. Twenty-four hours a day, the phones are destination No. 1 for hundreds of released inmates of both jails.

A group led by Los Angeles investment firm William E. Simon & Sons bought majority stakes in two independent operators of pay telephones in California: Pacific Coin of Van Nuys and Nucom of San Leandro. The deals are part of Simon's plan to buy several small independents, for a total price exceeding $100 million, and combine them to become a major player in the pay-phone field.

Dorothy Garwood got an unpleasant surprise when she lifted the receiver on a pay phone at Santa Monica's Third Street Promenade. A local call cost Garwood, 77, nearly twice as much as it had a few weeks ago--35 cents, not the 20 cents she expected. "This was the first time I had noticed," Garwood said. "I think they should have made us a little more prepared, given us a little more notice. "It seems very high for an ordinary phone call."

Even in this complicated age, rural America isn't necessarily the best place to be. A schoolmate from my days growing up in Palm Springs, Mary Jo Stephens Churchwell, recently sent me her book, "The Cabin on Sawmill Creek," about living 13 years in a rustic cabin in the Idaho Rockies. "There are all kinds of costs nowadays having nothing to do with old-fashioned, simple survival," Churchwell writes. "There are taxes on property, goods and gasoline.

AT&T Corp.'s charges will increase by 35 cents Sunday for some pay-phone customers. The per-call increase results from a change in federal rules last year requiring AT&T and other telephone companies to pay owners of pay phones millions of dollars more for such calls. The rate increase applies to pay-phone calls made with credit cards or AT&T's calling card and to operated-assisted and collect calls. Coin-calls rates remain the same.

Pay telephone companies, beginning next fall, will be free to charge whatever rates they choose and will no longer have to maintain pay telephones in unprofitable locations as a result of controversial federal rules that took effect Friday. Many consumer groups, long-distance companies and state regulators are furious about the new rules, contending that they will make pay telephones in California and around the country more expensive and harder to find in certain neighborhoods.

Huntington Park's mayor said Monday that high-tech pay phones will be installed on city sidewalks to help cut crime. Huntington Park City Council members believe that the new Pacific Bell phones--equipped with calling card fraud detectors and high-powered night lights--will deter crimes involving pay phone use along portions of busy Pacific Boulevard.