GILFORD — When selectmen voted on Wednesday to ask FairPoint Communications to remove its payphone at the Glendale docks, they did it because it was costing the town $83 month and officials felt it was no longer needed.
But once the Glendale payphone is gone, will Gilford join the ever-growing ranks of American towns that no longer have a payphone?
The Daily Sun went looking for payphones in Gilford, starting in the places one could expect to find one — the movie theater, gas stations and shopping areas.
The WalMart plaza has some holes in a wall outside the vestibule that look like, at one point in time, there was a payphone. The Gilford Cinemas have the vestiges of what was once a pay phone right down to the kiosk and an empty black phone book holder handing from its chain.
There is an empty blue phone booth protected by two yellow concrete pillars at the Airport Country Store and Deli but the booth is gutted. Even the old payphone outside in the woods outside the Big Apple on the corner of County Club Road is gone.
Norman Soucy of the Gilford Village Store has a story behind the demise of his payphone. Initially, Soucy began, the Pepsi truck hit it. He said the phone belonged to a private company, he didn't remember the name, and they came to fix it.
Just after it was fixed, said Soucy, "a plow truck hit it. Took it clean of the building."
He said he picked it up, put it in his back room and called the company. Soucy said he called a number of times and after a few weeks gave up on them. He said it was about two years later when "some guy" came into the store and was looking for his pay phone.
Soucy said he told him it was in the back and asked him why his company never returned his phone calls. He said the guy looked at him and said, "Well we're not very good at answering the phone."
"He left and I never saw him or the payphone again," Soucy said.
He said he didn't pay for the phone and wasn't getting any revenue from it. "It was really a pain," he said. "The kids would throw gum on it, really trash it."
Ray Lakeman knows a lot about payphones. A Belknap County Sheriff Departmant deputy who works security at the Superior Courthouse, Lakeman retired from Verizon and was once the security manager for the three northern New England states' payphones.
He said there were about 15,000 payphones in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont when he retired in 1992.
"Just last week they came and took the one out of this building," he said, noting it was a private company because FairPoint sold its payphone business.
In May of 2012, Fairpoint sold it Northern New England payphones to Pacific Telemanagement Services. In their media release, FairPoint said at the time it had about 4,000 phones in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont.
At one point, Lakeman said it was a major source of income for the phone companies and he managed the crews that collected the coins. He said each box could hold up to $200 and part of his job was timing the collections so the money was picked up at the right time.
"If it got full it went out of service. If there wasn't enough money, it wasn't profitable to collect it," he said.
The collections were taken daily by armored cars to Boston where it was processed by the Boston Federal Reserve Bank. He said every day, he reported the projected income to Verizon whose accountants factored the income into daily cash management.
"It was a good business for the phone companies before cell phones.
Wakeman has a payphone at this home. He was given a chrome-plated one by the company for his retirement. He said it is hooked up and his grandchildren "get a real kick" out of using it.
But is the Glendale payphone the last one in Gilford?
It is not. There is a payphone at Gunstock Mountain Resort in the main lodge just across from the Powder Keg.
Sales and Marketing Director Bill Quigley said it's in a blue box with a bright yellow handle and "must be very important."
When told he just may have the last payphone in Gilford, Quigley laughed aloud. "Maybe we'll use it in an advertising brochure or something," he said.

GILFORD — Two more Lakes Region High Schools which hold commencement exercises at Meadowbrook U.S. Cellular Pavilion are now working to revise their 2013 graduation plans after being informed their chosen dates had become unavailable because of recent concert bookings.
Gilford High School had planned to hold its graduation on Saturday, June 8, and Inter-Lakes High School was looking to hold its ceremonies two weeks later on Saturday, June 22. But officials with both schools said that Meadowbrook told them recently that musical acts had been booked for those dates and that the schools would need to make alternate arrangements.
Meadowbrook said the situation had come about because of a higher demand by musical groups to book dates in June than in past years.
Gilford Superintendent Kent Hemingway said Friday that he and other administrators were working to come up with a number of options for this year's graduation to present to the School Board for action. Hemingway said he expected the earliest that the School Board would act on the matter would be at its next scheduled meeting on Monday, Feb. 4.
The Inter-Lakes School Board is expected to deal with its graduation arrangements matter when it next meets on Feb. 12, according to Inter-Lakes High School Principal Patti Kennelly.
Belmont High School is the third school to be affected by the Meadowbrook schedule. On Thursday the Shaker Regional School Board voted to change the graduation date from Friday, June 7, to Sunday, June 9. At that meeting Shaker Superintendent Maria Dreyer told the board it was her understanding that Gilford was making plans to hold its graduation also on Sunday, June 9, soon after the Belmont High ceremonies had concluded.
But Hemingway said no decision had been made and that a number of options were under consideration. "We had a Plan A (for graduation)," he said referring to the June 8 date. "Now we are looking at Plan B, Plan C and Plan D." He declined to elaborate about the various options, explaining that he had not yet had a chance to confer with members of the School Board.
Similarly, Kennelly would not get specific as to how Inter-Lakes might address the situation.
Hemingway said that Gilford school officials had only learned on Tuesday that the date they had been planning on would not be available. He said the contract with Meadowbrook gives the concert venue the right to bump the graduation in favor of other events up until 60 days before the date and that Meadowbrook acted in accordance with that provision.
Emma Womack, Meadowbrook's vice president for corporate development, said that an unusually large number of concert bookings for June had made it necessary for Meadowbrook to tell the three schools that they would have to choose alternate dates for their graduations.
"We have to shift the dates (for graduation) around once in a while," she said, but added that Meadowbrook was working with officials at all three schools to find other dates and times which would almost certainly not conflict with forthcoming concert bookings. "We want to do everything possible to give them certainty" in their planning. "We are trying to be proactive."
But at the same time Womack said that Meadowbrook's main emphasis is booking concerts. "That's our business," she said.
Womack said that Meadowbrook first opened its venue to graduations about six years ago. She said that using Meadowbrook for graduations has proven popular with the graduates and their families. "We open our venue to schools because we want to be close to our communities," she said.
She characterized the need alter school graduation plans this year as "a bump in the road" and she did not think recent developments would make Meadowbrook any less viable as a setting for graduations in the coming years.
"Graduation is the most important day in their lives up to that point, and we love to be part of it," she said.
Shaker Regional is paying Meadbrook $2,000 to host Bemont's graduation.

GILFORD — With the sudden loss to service of Engine 2 Thursday afternoon, and Engine 4 still being repaired, Fire Engineer Bill Akerley and Chief Steve Carrier confirmed yesterday that the town is without a front-line attack fire truck.
Akerley said Gilford is no longer responding to mutual aid fire calls from other communities and is, at least until one of the engines is fixed, relying on mutual aid to cover the town's basic firefighting needs.
"This has severely diminished our firefighting capabilities and this is the wrong time of the year to have that happen," Akerley said.
Carrier said the Engine 2 crew was returning from a call Thursday afternoon when the 2002 vehicle lost power. He said the driver was able to "limp it back to the station" but when crews went to respond to another call, it wouldn't go into gear.
He borrowed an engine from Laconia overnight, but said Laconia's shift supervisor called yesterday morning and said the city needed it back because they had to take one of their front-line attack engines out-of-service for repairs. The alternative back-up from the Tilton-Northfield Fire Department failed its pump test, said Carrier, and is also out of service.
He said a technician from Repair Services of New England came to the station yesterday, tested Engine 2 and determined a sensor failed in the electronic transmission. To get at the sensor, he said the bell housing must come out and RSNE can't do it at the fire station.
At noon yesterday, he said Rusty's Towing disengaged the drive-shaft and towed the truck to Glendale. He said the irony is that Rusty's was supposed to tow Engine 4 to Lakes Region Fire Apparatus in Tamworth for installation of its new pump yesterday.
Carrier said in the event of a fire call, the town will respond with both the tanker and the pumper. He said the pumper holds two firefighters and 500 gallons of water. The tanker will follow with a lone driver. He said the attack engines typically hold up to four firefighters and enough water to fight a fire — 1,500 gallons.
For Akerley there is no irony. "The point I want to make is not having Engine 4 means exactly what has happened today," he said.
He noted that Gilford the town will have spent 572.5 man-hours plus a new pump to fix a 27-year-old fire truck (Engine 4), and now it has to spend money to fix the 11-year-old Engine 2.
"This scenario is exactly what the Board of Fire Engineers were concerned with when we asked for a fire engine in 2011," he said. "We are caught without adequate coverage in the middle of winter when every other fire department is having the same mechanical problems because of the cold."
He said that if the town had stayed on the capital replacement program mapped out years ago it would not be in this situation. "If people had listened to the experts this never would have happened," he said.
Selectboard Vice Chair John O'Brien said when a few members of the Budget Committee first challenged the town's need for a fire engine in 2012 and recommended fixing Engine 4 to get a few more years out of it, he said the selectmen "bought into it" and recommended not buying the engine at the 2012 town meeting. Voters agreed with that position.
After researching the repairs to Engine 4, he said the selectmen realized it was not in the best financial interests of Gilford to fix it and they voted unanimously to support the special warrant article this summer to purchase a new engine. Needing a three-fifths majority, the special warrant article failed by 10 votes.
"The dumb part was wasting $70,000 on fixing it," said O'Brien who alluded to the dollar amount of labor and parts that will have gone into Engine 4 by the time it is repaired.
"Now we're fixing Engine 4 and Engine 2," he said.
"The savers in town talked the people of Gilford into taking a big gamble," he said. "We lost this week and I just hope we don't lose more."