HOMEBREW BURGLAR ALARM

In the sixties we didn't have all the electronic goodies we now enjoy. Having no handheld radios was particularly dangerous and inconvenient but we didn't know any better. When electronic assistance was needed you had to use the Necessity Is a Mother Rule. Ingenuity.

Sometimes you'd have a burglar who had a good thing going and didn't want to give it up. This was often true of dopers who, to satisfy their habit, would break into the same place, time after time. And they liked drug stores because that's where the mother lode for hop heads was.

We had one who liked the Rexall at 5th Ave So and 8th Street. Hit it every couple of weeks. We weren't equipped to run long surveillances and the little portable burglar alarms they now have hadn't been invented. So we became young Tom Edisons.

The telephones, back then, were all big, heavy, black rotary dial things.  We decided to use one of its unique characteristics to make a burglar alarm. If you dialed all the numbers to the desired contact but didn't let the last number dialed return back to to zero point, the call wouldn't be put through. As an example, dial 774-443 then dial the last 4 but not let it rotate back, the line would stay poised to make the call, but wouldn't do it until you took out your finger and let the dial process finish. Folks used this trick all the time calling radio stations to win money. The next caller will win $25. People would wait around with all the numbers dialed, but their finger holding the last number back. When the announcer gave the word to call, they'd let go and the call was instantly put through. 

So we went to the Rexall one evening, selected a phone near a pathway in the store that had to be traversed, dialed all but the last number to the PD, tied a string in the finger hole, tied the string across the pathway, then went home.

The idea was that when the burglar broke in, in the dark, and went down the pathway, he'd pull the string loose from where we had it loosely affixed, the dial would rotate home, and a call would be made to the PD. Dispatch was instructed that if they received a call with no one on the line, send a car to the Rexall post haste.

Mickey Mouse rig, right? Rube Goldberg at his best. Redneck engineering. That ain't what the burglar thought when we caught him in the act. And we caught another, the same way, at the Moorings Pro Shop.

Next we invented the wheel.