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.
