Bucky Walter

Kind of an odd pay telephone sign, wouldn't you agree?

It's from the small town of Boonville, CA (population 1,035) in the Anderson Valley region of northern California.  Boonville is a somewhat isolated community and during the late 1800s and early 1900s it developed its own language, Boontling.  The dialect has about a thousand terms and is filled with various oddballisms.  One of these, according to A Dictionary of Boontling, is:

buckey walter, n., A pay telephone.  [Combination of buckey (nickel) and "Walter." A man named Walter Levi owned the first phone in the valley; as a result, a walter levi is a telephone.  Early pay telephones required only a nickel.  Some informants say a local Indian (buck injun) once made a phone call that could be heard all over the valley.  He apparently thought he had to project his voice in a shout in order for it to carry.  Hence bucky is said to be an allusion to the Indian in the celebrated story.]

It's not clear to me whether the pay telephone sign was actually manufactured by Pacific Bell or later modified to fit the local dialect.  It now hangs on the wall in a grocery store in Boonville.

Comments

[Sam Rislove Etler]

I wonder which came first, "buck injun" or buckey. Because keep in mind that nickels from 1913-1938 had an Indian head on the obverse. Could be related perhaps.