1960s-1970s green Contempra rotary telephone

Our 25 ft x 50 ft 2-story granary barn was built around 1910 and has the original cupola.  It is on a five-acre farmstead we bought in 1976.  In the attic had been a variety of old telephones, most of which came in the 1980s and not long after from Bob Prosser.  Bob had an ongoing relationship with the telephone companies in three Canadian provinces --Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, but mostly Saskatchewan, for acquiring semi loads of phones after a new style of phone replaced an older style.

This arrangement began with the old wood crank phones.  In the 1980s, Bob had large racks built out of pallets.  Ordinary rotary desk phones would be pallet jacked off Canadian telephone semi trailers as they came in, and got thrown up onto the pile in the racks to the ceiling in a very large old creamery building.

I made many trips to Bob’s through the 1970s and 1980s, buying all kinds of old discontinued telephones.  And in 1980 I began buying him out.  We gradually hauled the whole contents of the creamery in twenty semi loads to Phoneco.  Then we hauled another 13 loads in 1991.

That’s how a few Contempras came to be here.  There’s more to the stories.  Call me afternoons or evenings if you want to hear more.  I turned 87 in December 2022.

On July 20, 2023, I went into the granary attic in hopes of finding French cradle phones to take to an antique market in Winona, MN.  I encountered a heavy box labeled SaskTel that had not been opened.  It was heavy.  I became curious and found inside these previously undisturbed old Contempras.  I had never taken any out of the small box they were in, packed inside the larger box previously unopened.  These phones had probably been in our granary attic since the 1990s at least.

You ask: “does it work?”  Well, it should.  That’s all I know about it.  The phones are untested.  They were made in the time before modular jacks, so the line cords are designed to be wired into 4-prong plugs.  The plugs are not included, so the phones are not ready to plug into a live jack right out of the box.  We have some 4-prong plugs still left from the 1990s and early 2000s, available for $6.00 each.

The label says “Pat. 1967.” I looked one over.  We’ll leave the other unwrapped.  That’s the way you’ll get it.  The dial rotated O.K.

The Contempra is one of the first “dial in the handset” telephones.  Perhaps the Ericofon from the 1950s was the first.

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