Belleville retiree hunts for unique vintage phone prototypes

The Intelligencer (Belleville) 28 Oct 2023 DEREK BALDWIN

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Doug Duffy, 66, still remembers in 1969 as a 12-year boy in junior high school at Finch and Weston Road in Toronto coming home to find the most marvelous device sitting on a phone table in his family living room.

Back in the day, it was always convenient to have a couple of extra hardline phones in the house plugged into a wall jack in the master bedroom or den.

Today, as mobile phones virtually have replaced traditional telephones, retired Belleville resident Doug Duffy, 66, has about 400 Telephone related items set up in his home’s basement man cave, part of a collection he has spent years building.

Duffy still remembers in 1969 as a 12-year boy in junior high school at Finch and Weston Road in Toronto coming home to find the most marvelous device sitting on a phone table in his family living room.

“I looked at it and I didn’t know what it was. When I picked it up, it was a rotary Contempra phone in chocolate brown,” said the retired Belleville resident.

“My parents were home and they were sort of chuckling. The only thing we ever had was a wall phone in the kitchen.”

Little did Duffy know the moment he saw the futuristic phone would be the humble beginnings of a dedicated hobby learning and acquiring all manner of telephones that now grace his basement man cave in an impressive collection of around 400 Telephone items dating back to as far as the early 1900s.

The beautiful assortment of phones is a living testimony to Belleville’s close-knit history with Bell Canada, Northern Electric (later Nortel) and Bell Northern Research.

His childhood memory of that new brown phone in his childhood home was reignited about 15 years ago when he purchased a vintage wall phone at Value Village in Belleville and caught the collector’s bug with a few more purchases of older telephones.

But, his love of collecting phones really took off when he acquired a rare prototype model of the same Contempra phone he first saw in his parents’ Toronto home that day.

If you’re old enough, you will remember the radical design change to the phone handset at the time which, when viewed from the side, had an upside-down V shape similar to the roof of a house.

“My next great purchase was the prototype of the Contempra speaker phone. There is a picture of the blue one but it has never surfaced while this one, as far as I know, is the only one. John Tyson, the designer of the Contempra, sent me a back a letter stating, in fact, it was a prototype,” Duffy said, adding he had joined online phone collector clubs at the time.

His passion then turned to finding more very rare phone models with the help of phone collector club members.

“It just seemed as time progressed that prototypes, field trials and engineering samples seemed to fall into my lap. I was into payphones for a while but I got a little bored with them. But with the prototype phones, there was always something different,” Duffy said.

He now has roughly three dozen prototype phones that have taken years to seek out, acquire and properly house in a glass display case in his old telephone room.

The driving factor behind his push to find them is similar to the story of many avid collectors of everything from soup to nuts.

“For me, it’s the hunt to find one that’s unique and rare. When I get it, I totally disassemble them, recondition them, put them back together and display them,” Duffy said surrounded by shelves of other phone memorabilia to accompany his collection.

“I don’t buy the average phone anymore. If it’s unique and special, I will buy it,” he said, adding he also likes vintage commercial phone company signs that adorn his space.

His love for phones has also moved into his garage where he has installed a vintage red North American phone booth from the early 1940s which he completely restored.                               

Of course, the phone booth is replete with a working payphone model hooked up to his landline, Duffy added.

Copyright The Intelligencer (Belleville) 28 Oct 2023 DEREK BALDWIN