“All right,” he says, an unconventional answer.
A couple of minutes later as he resumes a walk-through of his homespun Telephone Museum in a building behind his house in McGregor, Spradley excuses the interruption, explaining that he is chief of the McGregor Volunteer Fire Department and has to take calls now and then.
That, though, is his day job.
His true passion comes when he talks about the phones and more than 1,000 pieces of other phone memorabilia in the museum, located in a building near his house. He and his father were able to add on to that building after Hollywood called Spradley and his father looking for World War II-era phone expertise and equipment for a movie.
“This part (of the building) was basically financed through a movie that they rented a bunch of equipment for,” Spradley says about the 1981 flick, “Raggedy Man,” starring Sissy Spacek.
The movie was about a divorced mother of two (Spacek) working in a small Texas town during World War II and her relationship with a serviceman.
“Why the movie didn’t get any good reviews, I don’t know, ’cause it was an excellent movie,” Spradley says.
In addition to the Spradleys leasing the equipment for the movie, Spradley’s father taught actors how to use the equipment and the mannerisms of operators in that day.
A framed picture of Moe Spradley’s father arm-in-arm with Spacek hangs on the wall amid phone company relics.
Moe Spradley says his interest in phones came about through his job, as well as through his father, Ed “Moe” Spradley (his best friends were named Roe and Poe). Ed Spradley retired from the phone company after 40 years and a day.
“He had a boss that didn’t realize when 40 years was up,” the younger Spradley explains as he leans casually on a cabinet filled with antique phones and equipment.
“It ended up costing the company a little bit ’cause he got an anniversary gift and a retirement gift,” he says.
The younger Moe Spradley (Moe is his legal name, although it was his father’s nickname), followed his father’s career and retired in 2000 from Southwestern Bell after 30 years in the business, taking with him an interest in phones that has not waned.
Some of his collection he found on his own, but a large bulk of it came about in an unexpected way.
“A gentleman I used to take fishing trips all the time at the coast, he willed me 58,000 pounds of telephones and equipment back in ’76,” he says. “And that’s basically how we got started.”
He said the windfall wound up in McGregor after five hauling trips between there and Marble Falls.
Spradley said that since then he has continued to collect and occasionally people donate phone-related items to the museum, both large and small.
With the same enthusiasm he uses when speaking of “Raggedy Man,” he also tells of a woman who brought her Sunday school class through the museum, then later donated a shadowbox with phone memorabilia in it. It included anniversary service pins she earned from 1945 to 1975 working as an operator. She told Spradley her children would likely have eventually just thrown the items away.
“If it comes here it’ll go no further,” Spradley said. “As you can see, I think I’m about to run out of room,” and he gestures around the walls full of phones of all ages and types.
One of Spradley’s favorites in the museum is a payphone - but not the kind in a booth, although he has got three of those as well.
The phone is box-shaped, about as big as a gallon of milk, and has a handle on top so it could be moved easily.
“This is a phone that would set on a counter like at a general store, and if you come in and wanted to use a phone … and if the proprietor didn’t like you, he’d just put it under the counter,” Spradley says.
Spradley demonstrates how different tones sound when coins are inserted in the phone so the operator on the other end would know that real money was used for the call.
A similar phone, called a courtesy phone, was based on an honor system and simply contained a slotted box to put coins in.
Spradley’s collection includes three phone booths, a pair of which are equipped with lights and fans that still run when the door is shut. That set of phone booths came from Marlin where they were nearly hauled away to a landfill.
“You can’t find pay phones anymore,” Spradley says. “People are using cell phones and text messaging and all that kind of goings-on all the time.”
Spradley’s phone rings again.
“Alrighty,” he answers.
After a short conversation he walks into a second room full of magneto-style phones (wooden, hand crank phones) on the walls and rests his arm on a 1900 Kellogg switchboard, which has a bit of Texas and Mexico history behind it.
When the Rio Grande flooded in 1952, he says, it took the International Bridge out between the United States and Mexico, and with it communications lines between the two countries.
“They took this switchboard and loaded it on a Piper Cub (airplane) … and they strung a cable across what was left of the bridge and … got the United States and Mexico back on the way to talking back and forth to each other,” he says.
Spradley has spent many hours restoring many of the phones in his collection. His care and affection for his collection can be seen in the time he has spent getting the old relics back to good working order.
“After working on them and restoring them, you get to be more familiar with them,” he says.
“It’s nothing to spend 12 or 14 hours in the shop. Time goes by just like that before you realize how long you’ve
