Wisconsin couple has tens of thousands of old phones — and nobody to buy them (2024)

GALESVILLE — The numbers are staggering, the conditions less than ideal and the future uncertain.

Time, technology and changing tastes have derailed a once profitable, unique business that at its peak sold thousands of vintage telephones to buyers from around the world and produced revenues of nearly $1 million a year.

Only now, Ron and Mary Knappen are trying to determine what to do with their vast Phoneco inventory, which draws little interest these days. It’s the same challenges faced by others who deal in antiques like roll-top desks, sets of china, oil lamps, armoires and salt and pepper shakers.

The Knappens, Ron, 87, and Mary, 82, possess a collection that over the past 52 years has clearly gotten out of hand.

We’re not talking about a basem*nt, attic or garage filled with boxes and bins.

The granary constructed in 1903 is full of phones, same with the barn and its silo built in 1957 after a tornado destroyed the original dairy structure. The pole shed from Menards put up in 1979 is filled with telephones along with 33 semi-trailers, some missing their doors and surrounded by junked cars, trucks and campers. One, according to Knappen, holds 1,000 walnut boxes for vintage wall phones. Another is used to store 1,000 steel desk phones.

A mile away, on a separate property, the Knappens have filled a former chicken barn with telephones and they have an 80-foot-long, 60-foot-wide steel shed, half of which is filled with phones, the other half with 12 cars and trucks.

The Knappens are also in the process of trying to empty a 41,000-square-foot building in downtown Galesville.

Located below the dam along Little Tamarack Creek, the former dairy manufacturing facility has been owned by the Knappens since 1988. They are selling the building and need to be out by July. It’s unclear if they have enough space in their other facilities to hold the collection from the Galesville building that houses thousands of more phones, including scores that are part of a multi-room museum.

“At first it looked like it was going to be easy, but as the months go by and the older you get, the harder and harder it gets,” said Ron Knappen. “It was a very wonderful building to operate in, but we’re unable to have the resources now, financially, to operate out of that building.”

The Knappens believe the $240,000 from the sale of the building will fund their retirement, but it will do nothing to solve the issue of finding homes for their telephone collection.

You name it

There are wooden wall phones from the early 1900s, steel and plastic dial and push-button phones and a whole slew of payphones. Some phones are in the shape of Kermit the Frog, Garfield and Mickey Mouse. There are desk phones with multiple lines and ornate phones made of brass. The only cellphone is Ron’s black flip phone he bought from Walmart more than 10 years ago.

In addition to the phones, some of which are priced at more than $350, there are boxes of handsets, cords, plugs, bells and wire. Need the 1977 Yellow Pages from Chicago? They have that, too.

What’s lacking are customers and a succession plan. There are few orders and the couple’s three children have no interest in the business.

“Right now the order situation is pretty stagnant,” Ron Knappen said. “The sales are so pitiful. It’s in a very sad point of decline.”

How it started

Ron began reading Popular Mechanics while in high school in Illinois and in the back of the magazine were ads for a company that sold old phones in Turtle Lake, about an hour northwest of Eau Claire. After serving in the U.S. Navy during the Korean War, Ron used the GI Bill in 1957 to attend UW-Stout, where he studied education, drove a Model A coupe and became an industrial arts instructor. He and Mary married in 1960 after they met at a dance and spent four years teaching in Amboy, Illinois, one year in Mineral Point and seven years in Melrose.

But throughout his teaching career he and his wife had dabbled in buying and selling traditional antiques. Their life trajectory changed in 1971, when Ron bought eight wooden box phones from a dealer. He placed a classified ad in a newspaper and received more than 50 responses. That led to more, and advertisem*nts in Antique Trader magazine, which in turn led to calls from across the country. Ron quit teaching in 1973 to devote his full attention to a business that would ultimately grow to nearly 40 part-time employees after they moved in 1976 from Melrose to rural Galesville.

“The phone just rang off the hook and I knew where there were old phones,” Ron said. “It was fun in the heyday.”

In 1981, the company was approved by the Federal Communications Commission to test and repair telephones with the downtown building housing departments for painting, polishing, repairing and shipping phones.

Their inventory exploded in 1991, when the Knappens purchased 13 semi-trailer loads of phones from the Turtle Lake business after the owner died. Phoneco also began supplying phones to Hollywood for period-specific movies. They included in 2005 “The Lost City,” which featured Andy Garcia, and “Cinderella Man,” directed by Ron Howard. A year later, Phoneco phones appeared next to Scarlett Johansson and Hilary Swank in “The Black Dahlia,” and in “The Good Shepherd,” which featured a star-studded cast of Robert De Niro, Matt Damon, Angelina Jolie and Alec Baldwin.

Refined mission

But the glory days of antique and not-so-antique phones, which included trips across the country to buy and sell phones, are in the past with just a few orders a week now. Much of the focus is spent on trying to empty the building in Galesville. The Knappens have taken more than 50 loads with their pickups and also have used the couple’s Buick Riviera for the 9-mile round trip from their farm to Galesville and back.

They’ve barely made a dent.

On Tuesday, Mary drove the Buick around the farm, stopping at specific trailers to unload phones from her trunk. At one trailer, she climbed up a makeshift ladder to a wooden door that had been installed along with plywood in place of the traditional metal double doors. She admits, it’s a bit overwhelming.

“It is. We’re just trying to get it all out,” Mary said. Ron’s “upset with me because I just don’t throw it into a pile. I want to sort it as we go.”

The Knappens still take time out for dinner with friends and recently traveled to Quonset Hall in Thorp to dance to Polish polkas, but thoughts of their phones are never far. Neither uses a cane or walker while Ron, who will turn 88 in December, continues to climb into trailers, traverse the steep wooden steps of the barn and walks briskly, whether he’s showing off the trailers or is in one of the many buildings.

An office is under construction in one end of the barn, which will replace the office in Galesville, but they still have mountains of work remaining in order to empty out their downtown facility. Winter is near, which will only hinder the process.

“These old trucks we drive aren’t going to be easy to negotiate,” Ron said. “Mary is optimistic and very energetic and I’ve always been an adventurous person. But it looks pretty dismal to us.”