Telephone repairman heavily invested in ‘Ma Bell’ antiques
Ron Knappen regularly works on pay telephones like this early wooden wall-mount model. Image courtesy of LiveAuctioneers Archive and Victorian Casino Antiques.
They don’t even own a cell phone out here in the sticks where Ron Knappen has set up a phone repair empire that includes 29 semitrailers crammed with phone parts and out buildings packed with wood phone carcasses, steel phone bodies, handsets, dials and name plates for pay phones that have seen better days.
Phones are stacked to the rafters on Ron’s farm, which he shares with his wife, Mary. Together, they run Phoneco Inc., a vintage phone business started about 40 years ago at the kitchen table. Today, they have more phones than they can count.
Ron, 75, has dreams beyond the phone business. “I would like to be a street preacher. I would like to learn to play ragtime piano,” he said recently as he wandered the farm. But even he knows these phones have him connected to a switchboard that will never stop ringing in his lifetime.
Instead, he’s plowing determinedly through his inventory with the help of a few part-time workers. That means Ron is out in the old granary from sunup to sundown most days – except Sunday. That’s reserved for polkas. He and Mary check out the action on dance floors from Galesville to Osseo to La Crosse.
“And sometimes Saturdays,” Mary said, as she surveyed the piles of phone parts jammed to the rafters of the granary. The attic above is also packed with phone parts and nary a dancing shoe in sight.
Today, Ron is focused on refurbishing a group of 1912 pay phones. Some have been changed and updated through the years, getting new innards, pay slots and paint treatments as phone companies kept recycling those steel carcasses.
It’s Ron’s job to take away the paint and the years and return the phones to their earliest possible incarnation. To do that, he has harvested boxes of tiny screws from other phones and rescued coin slots, name plates and coin returns.
To the casual onlooker, this looks like a Herculean task that will never be completed. Sometimes, that’s how Ron sees it, too, with thousands of phones waiting to be reassembled and restored.
“We’ve been in the antique telephone business since 1973 full time. We’ve had thousands of phones go through our hands here.”
Though he is a lover of all things antique, it was phones that snared his long-term interest.
“And it was by accident, really,” Ron said.
He started collecting as a boy, bringing home old kerosene lamps and clocks from the dump near their house. He got interested in old cars and other old things, too. “I’ve still got one set of china I gave to my wife in 1950,” he said.
Throughout college and beyond, Knappen kept coming back to antiques, even though he was making his living as a teacher. “I was a picker,” he said. “I’ve always been an adventuresome person into the past.”
But things got serious when he stumbled across a bushel basket of ceramic dials at a rummage sale. He paid a dollar for them and turned and sold them to an antique dealer for $7. Then in 1971, he met telephone collector Bud Johnson from Galesburg, Ill. Knappen would buy his wood crank phones and flipped them for a small profit. So when it came time to sell his collection, he called Ron.
“I spent $200 and put them in my ’56 Buick, and they were ringing all the way home,” Ron said. “Every time we would hit a bump they would ring. I came home with those and I was nervous.” Ron figured he’d blown his wad foolishly.
But he started fixing and selling them and went back for more of Johnson’s collection. That’s when he gave up teaching to make his living off the phones.
“It was good,” Ron said. “We were selling one wood wall phone a day.”
He rang up his biggest investment in 1980 when he paid $230,000 for another dealer’s collection of phones, paying out the balance over 16 years.
Yes, Ron Knappen really does like phones.
“There were 6,000 pay phones in that building,” and lots of other phones, he said. “I bought my own semi and got 20 semi loads. I had the idea … Well, I had a lot of ideas, and my imagination gets too out of hand.”
He wanted to fix them up and put them back in service, but the time for pay phones on street corners had passed.
Still, he was selling pay phones like crazy, he said, until about 1987. Then the business slowed. Now, he caters to collectors.
At the height of the empire, 50 employees cleaned and repaired the old phones. Now he has just a few, including Maria Mau, who was painstakingly washing a grimy phone and checking all the connections while Ron talked about the phones surrounding her workbench.
“I like the Trimlines,” she said. “They remind me of my mom and dad.”
She likes working in the old granary, learning as she works.”You work with Ron, not for Ron,” she said. “And every day you learn something.”
Ron hopes the latest effort on those 1912 pay phones is a boost toward retirement. He has the parts he needs and the right kind of screws. Now he just needs to put them all together to restore the phones to their prewar splendor.
“I still enjoy it,” Ron said, “but I’d kind of like to do something else and pretend like I’m retired.”
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Information from: La Crosse Tribune, http://www.lacrossetribune.com
Copyright 2011 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
AP-WF-07-01-11 1755GMT
ADDITIONAL IMAGES OF NOTE
Ron Knappen regularly works on pay telephones like this early wooden wall-mount model. Image courtesy of LiveAuctioneers Archive and Victorian Casino Antiques.
