Quirk of the Week: Operator, give us a number of year-end oddities

Kirby Neumann-Rea/News-Register##Note that the stuffy at The Pub is an elephant — but not a pink elephant.

Kirby Neumann-Rea/News-Register##Old print blocks form a newspaper retrospective at what is now Nash & Nichol.

Kirby Neumann-Rea/News-Register##“10/11” loom high at Grandhaven gym, also used for adult recreational basketball.

Kirby Neumann-Rea/News-Register##Paper sign taped inside Bi-Mart makes it clear: Don’t stoop to exit here.

Kirby Neumann-Rea/News-Register##Antique lobby phone booth now locked in Butler Building, “1” etched on the door, was a tight squeeze in its day.

This year’s-end grab bag of revisits and newly found Quirk might give new meaning to “phoning it in.”

Plenty of cool indoor items deserve a look this week, starting with an elephant.

There’s more indoors (phones included):

- Celebrating New Year’s at The Pub (formerly The Oak) on Davis Street downtown? Have a look at the large toy elephant over the bar. In a town with odd memorabilia and décor (the peacock in La Rambla, framed fedoras at Cabana Club, the old high school scoreboard at Two Dogs Taphouse), the elephant in the room is right at home.

- The historic newspaper production mural — part collage, part preservation piece — inside the former News-Register office, now Nash & Nichol mercantile. The murals, totaling 20-by-60 feet, are made up of hundreds of actual letterpress printing blocks — moveable imprints with headlines, photos, and advertising and made with metal, wood and aluminum. They range from less than an inch (a single letter) to a foot or two wide. The blocks, along with some full-page aluminum plates, are a tribute to the newspaper printing technology used until the 1970s.

- Last year, we mentioned the unique portal for shopping carts at Bi-Mart: about 4 feet high, it’s a snug passageway for carts getting returned to inside. Unique enough, but have a look at the sign inside that short doorway. Reading “No Exit,” it would suggest someone’s tried to leave the store while all hunched over.

- Gym spaces at local schools are full of murals, motivational signs and even multi-discipline material — such as Grandhaven Elementary gym’s plethora of numbers: numbers everywhere, brightly colored and laminated, helping kids soak up math while they run and romp. There’s repetition and order to the digits, but then look up: 20 feet above the floor, alone and seemingly random, the numbers 10 and 11. Why are they there? PE teacher Reid Kimura, who put them up six years ago, said they are too high to easily remove, so they have remained.

A couple of other re-visits, to put us, as promised, in the phone theme:

a. The red British-style callbox that stood for years in downtown Carlton, has been moved inside to the downtown McMinnville headquarters of Visit McMinnville;

b. The abandoned phone booth in front of Harvest Fresh Grocery and Deli with its cord tied in a knot and broken handset looks increasingly dilapidated.

That’s a segue to the fact that it is not the only decommissioned phone booth in downtown McMinnville. The other is far older but in decidedly better condition:

While historic buildings still retain certain reminders of past glory (transoms, wainscoting, stained glass and intercoms — it sort of rhymes) there is a truly antique booth in the Butler Building on Davis.

The earpiece-on-a-cord Western Electric phone in the former bank lobby gets a mention here despite not being fully accessible, but if you know someone with offices there, you could look at the elegant little structure built into the wall. It’s locked but visible; you can look inside and see the tiny confines people used to place themselves inside to make a phone call. Get those dimes out before you shut the door, because it is cramped. Under the original bell-shaped mouthpiece is an 8-inch platform for writing upon.

(Everyone knows about the rare materials needed for modern mobile devices, but plenty of materiel went into these Woodrow Wilson-era phones, too. A Western Electric ad diagrams the raw materials “to give some idea of the complexity of your telephone”: aluminum diaphragm, silk cord covering, iron magnet, copper receiver pieces, rubber receiver case, wool felt at base of telephone, flax in linen paper in transmitter button; nickel springs, mica diaphragm in transmitter; coal granules in transmitter button, shellac mouthpiece coating, gold/platinum/silver in springs; cotton cord covering, zinc springs, and lead and tin in soldered joints.)

Oh, and asphalt wasn’t always just for roads; it was used as “one of the outside finish constituents.”

One last nicety about the Butler phone booth: The glass is etched with “1” — suggesting multiple phone booths in that bygone lobby.