ATHABASCA — Set back from the road in an unassuming Quonset with no indication of the treasures inside there is a hidden gem just east of Athabasca.
Harold Northcott's eye for telephones developed when he worked for the Newfoundland Phone Company and that grew into a passion for collecting – over 1,000 of them and counting – turning it into the largest collection in Alberta, if not Canada.
“I've always collected,” the 76-year-old said, as he showed off his collector's cache of communication devices that go back almost to the dawn of the invention of telephony itself. “I used to be a gun collector — antiques — especially in rifles.”
That collection has now been passed along to his son who has continued the family tradition, building up his bounty to around 100 guns, but that left the time and room for Northcott to focus on his true passion as he worked on his career after leaving the phone company.
“From there I went to DeVry (Institute of Technology) in Toronto,” said Northcott. “I graduated as an engineering technologist and I worked for Bell Canada and De Havilland Aircraft.”
He went back to Newfoundland for a stint before returning to Alberta working for Syncrude.
“(Syncrude) wouldn't accept my engineering because I was overqualified for the job that was posted which is what I was so, I ended up becoming a power engineer,” he said. “Roughly, I’ll say 25 years at Syncrude, that’s where I retired from and I got back into telephones probably 20 years ago.”
When you open the door, you are greeted with the faint smell of wood smoke from the stove in the corner as you step into an array of museum-quality items ranging from collectibles, antiques and his large assortment of telephones. It’s a little dusty – it’s a private collection, not a museum after all – but it is very well organized.
From ink wells to Tonka toys, straight edge razors and old irons that either had to be heated on the stove or run by kerosene, antique flasks, a manual apple peeler, iron pots, one of the first portable TVs, a lobster trap and much more to bring back memories for anyone north of 50, Northcott, who could easily fit into any museum as a historical interpreter, starts his presentation for one on the various miscellaneous items in his Quonset museum before turning his tour to the multiple walls of phones.
“Now any of these phones, believe it or not, if you have a landline, you can operate this out of your house today,” he said, but noted that excludes the newer ones connected to a fiber optic line.
Without a way to dial you would only be able to receive a call, and if it is a rotary dial phone you won’t be able to ‘Press 1 for English’ or call 9-1-1, but you could use it as a fun party novelty to impress your friends.
He also has all the information you will ever need to know about telephones as he meticulously catalogues each of them, noting what needs to be repaired or replaced, if any parts are plastic, wood or Bakelite, if the cord is cloth or not and any of the history that comes along with the item.
“I photograph all the full serial numbers on them and I break them down, make sure they’re original, make sure they are working.”
Northcott limits his phones to rotary, with only a small handful of push button ones as they are too modern, but he tries to get one of each colour if the style of phone offered it.
“Every colour is there. The hardest colours to come by is the grey and the turquoise,” he said, referring to a row of Princess phones introduced in 1959 by Bell Systems and marketed to women, hence the name.
And he knows the history of how the first payphone was invented by a man upset he couldn’t find a public phone to call the doctor for his sick wife. The story is a bit murky as to who refused the use of a phone to William Gray but it gave him the inspiration for public telephones and in 1891 the Gray Telephone Pay Station Company was born and over 100 years later more than two million payphones were installed in the US alone, although that number has dwindled to around 300,000 with the invention of cell phones.
“He got the monopoly on these cash boxes to be made and held onto it for 45 years,” said Northcott. “(Other) guys who invented telephones or made them were lucky to get a five-year patent.”
But it was an undertaker in Kansas City, Missouri who brought the phone to the masses.
Almon Strowger wondered why he wasn’t getting calls about deaths and discovered his competition had paid off the switchboard operators. He invented low-cost phones, starting with a dial Candlestick, then a box version. Strowger was the first commercially successful company to bring the phone to the public and the first 11-digit phones.
“It’s a different type of dial because it’s got 11 instead of nine; it’s got zero plus the operator,” Northcott said.
He also has a staggering number of collectible character phones, from Buzz Lightyear to Spider-Man to Mickey Mouse. There is also a TV Guide promotional phone, phones that look like lips, a high heel shoe, a Jolly Green Giant Sprout phone put out by Pillsbury in 1984 and many more. If you can think of it, Northcott probably has a phone for it.
Northcott’s collection has been built by buying out other collectors, like his mentor, who still refurbishes phones at 92, or a trade here or there with other collectors, but he insists on providing the history as well.
“If you don’t have the history, it’s just an object,” he said. “If you can’t share the history there’s no point in having it.”
He’s part of the Antique Telephone Collectors Association and is one of just a handful of collectors in Canada. He also notes proudly that while most have around 300 phones in their collection, he has more than 1,000 and plans to continue growing the collection even more.
“And this makes it slow; I'm about two years behind on work here,” he said.
Between maintaining his home with wife Sandra, doing landscaping around the house and chopping firewood, he doesn’t have time to dedicate hours a day to restoring and cataloguing.
When asked what his wife thinks of his passion for collecting, he laughed and said, “No comment.”
Northcott said he isn’t open for tours, but he will show you around by appointment, and with so much to see, you could easily be there for several hours.
