85-year-old Hermon man learns he needn't lease his phone

Lloyd Overlock never had much reason to think about his telephone. The 85-year-old Hermon resident just paid his bills and knew the service was there if he needed it.

 

But Overlock, who for five decades has been paying a monthly fee to lease his phone, found out recently that the arrangement is a pricey, outmoded throwback to the days of telephone industry monopoly.

 

"I don’t use it much; I just sit here and wait for it to ring," he said Friday during a visit at the cozy home he built himself and moved into back in 1952. That’s the same year he got his telephone, a heavy, dark-gold contraption the size of a child’s shoebox, with a solid-feeling finger dial. It hung on his kitchen wall all those years — until last week, when his niece Roberta York was making one of her frequent visits from her home in Millinocket.

 

York said she peeked at a bill from AT&T lying on the kitchen table. As is the case with most area residents, she said, her uncle’s phone service is provided by Verizon, so she was curious.

 

"I said, ‘Uncle, what’s this?’ And he said, ‘That’s for my telephone.’ That’s when I realized he was still leasing his phone from AT&T," she said. "He got that phone in 1952, and he’s paying $4.42 a month for it, every month."

 

Right away, she said, she picked up the gold receiver and dialed the customer service number on the bill to cancel the service. The friendly operator on the other end attempted to dissuade her, offering her uncle a 20 percent discount off his monthly rental fee and reminding York of the benefits of leasing.

 

"She said that if something goes wrong with that phone, they’d have a new one here the next business day," she recalled. "I was thinking to myself, ‘If something goes wrong with that phone, I’ll go to Wal-Mart and get one the next day.’ But I didn’t say it." She just told the representative to cancel the lease, and then she drove to a local dollar-discount store and bought her Uncle Lloyd a new wall phone for $7. It plugged right in to the old connection and worked like a charm.

 

York said it troubles her that elderly people like her uncle get taken advantage of. The monthly lease doesn’t seem like a lot of money, she said, but it adds up.

 

"For some people, that four dollars could mean a gallon of milk or a prescription or something to eat," she said.

 

Wayne Jortner, an attorney with the Maine Public Advocate’s Office, said Friday that Overlock’s situation is not unique. Before 1984, when a federal court determined that AT&T’s lock on the nation’s telephone industry constituted an illegal monopoly, most consumers were required to lease their phones, he said. The forced restructuring of the industry included opening up the manufacturing of telephones, and people began purchasing their own instruments.

 

Now, leasing is rare. Most people who still lease are elderly, according to Jortner, and they keep making the monthly payments because they don’t realize they have an alternative or perceive that alternative as being too complicated.

 

They also may be paying much higher rates for phone service than they need to, as well as paying additional service charges and fees that could be eliminated by choosing a different service plan.

 

Jortner said a national settlement in 2003 against AT&T based on its leasing program awarded $80 per phone to thousands of consumers who had leased a telephone between 1984 and 1990.

 

The lease program is not illegal, he said, but consumer advocates faulted the company for some of its practices.

 

"The bottom line is, it’s totally ridiculous to lease a phone when you can buy a better one for much less money," Jortner said.

 

Attempts on Friday afternoon to reach AT&T’s corporate headquarters in San Antonio were unsuccessful. A call to the company’s leasing service headquarters in Florida resulted in several minutes of listening to a recorded on-hold message explaining the advantages of leasing a telephone. These included the next-day replacement service cited by York, as well as assurances that a leased phone will have "a real bell ringer" and be hearing aid-compatible. In addition, said the recording, "You can be assured that your lease supports jobs right here in the good old U.S. of A!" There is also a "lease rewards card" that offers discounts on prescriptions and hearing aids.

 

Faye, the customer service representative who eventually picked up, said "hundreds of thousands of people" prefer to lease a phone, although the actual number was not available. Charges vary depending on the telephone model and some other options, but the basic cost of a rotary-dial phone like Overlook’s gold-tone antique is $4.45 a month, she said. Customers are free to cancel their lease at any time, and instructions for doing so are printed on each month’s bill, she said.

 

On Friday, Overlock’s old telephone sat like a dull gold cinderblock on the coffee table, its heavy plastic casing battered and the receiver grimy from decades of use. York examined a prepaid white Mylar envelope that had arrived from AT&T a few days earlier with instructions to mail the phone to Fort Worth, Texas, in order to complete the cancellation of the lease.

 

"We have five weeks to send it back, or they’ll start billing him again with all the back charges," she said.

 

According to Jortner, the mail-back requirement is nothing but "a hurdle to customers trying to get the lease charge off their bills." The phone itself is essentially without value, he said, but many senior citizens will forget to put the package in the mail, or be unable to get to the post office, or not understand that the envelope is prepaid.

 

Not a chance, said York. "They’re pushing against the wrong person," she said.

 

Overlock, meanwhile, said he likes his new phone, a sleek, silver touch-tone model that fills only a fraction of the space left by its predecessor. He never has tried making a call using push-buttons instead of a rotary dial, but figures he can get used to it.

 

He brightened when a test call from a nearby cell phone filled his small home with the new phone’s shrill ring — the first time he had heard it.

 

"Now, that’s quite a phone," he said with a smile.

Sightings of mysterious giant bird continue in San Antonio

Loch Ness has its monster. Does San Antonio have one, too?Strange sightings of a huge flying creature have been reported as recently as six months ago. Is it a monster or myth?Guadalupe Cantu III was busy working his newspaper route, but he says the big news of that day 10 years ago flew right over his car. He says he's seen what most have not — an unidentified flying object, one that still scares him."We were afraid that it would come at us. So we stayed in the car till it passed this way," witness Guadalupe Cantu III said. "This thing's all feathers, all black. Much bigger than me. It looked at us. It had very stooped-up shoulders." The beast has been spotted from the Rio Grande Valley to the mountains of New Mexico.

Scariest dog picture you'll see all day

People mistake her for a pitbull with a pinhead, but Wendy the whippet is one rare breed.So rare that the Central Saanich dog recently graced the New York Times. She also had several of her photos shown on The Today Show, all because of a rare genetic mutation that has led to her being the Incredible Hulk of dogs.Wendy is a 27-kilogram rippling mass of muscle. Forget the so-called six-pack stomach: Wendy has a 24-pack. And the muscles around her neck are so thick, they look like a lion's ruff.

What Was Paris Smoking?

We hate to call ex-con Paris Hilton a liar, but when she told Larry King last night that she had never taken drugs, it seems that the heiress somehow forgot about the marijuana, hashish, mushrooms, and Quaaludes. Hilton's, um, familiarity with illegal substances was memorialized on home videos she shot over the past several years in various cities. As we've previously reported, her videos are available on a web site that charges about $20 for a one-month subscription. You'll find , Hilton does (and talks) drugs with sister Nicky, former boyfriend Jason Shaw, assorted swells, and a very accommodating guy named Jose.

Without U.S. Rules, Biotech Food Lacks Investors

This little piggy’s manure causes less pollution. This little piggy produces extra milk for her babies. And this little piggy makes fatty acids normally found in fish, so that eating its bacon might actually be good for you.

The three pigs, all now living in experimental farmyards, are among the genetically engineered animals whose meat might one day turn up on American dinner plates. Bioengineers have also developed salmon that grow to market weight in about half the typical time, disease-resistant cows and catfish needing fewer antibiotics, and goats whose milk might help ward off infections in children who drink it.

Only now, though, do federal officials seem to be getting serious about drafting rules that would determine whether and how such meat, milk and filets can safely enter the nation’s food supply.

Some scientists and biotechnology executives say that by having the Food and Drug Administration spell out the rules of the game, big investors would finally be willing to put up money to create a market in so-called transgenic livestock.

“Right now, it’s very hard to get any corporate investment,” said James D. Murray, a professor at the University of California, Davis, who developed the goats with the infection-fighting milk. “What studies do you need to do? What are they looking for?” he said, referring to government regulators. “That stuff’s not there.”

But some experts caution that even if the F.D.A. clears the regulatory path in coming months, investors and agribusiness companies might still shy away. Many fear that consumers would shun foods from transgenic animals, sometimes referred to as genetically modified organisms, or G.M.O.’s.

“The companies we have spoken to have gone organic, and they are very concerned, at least up to the present time, of having G.M.O. associated with their name,” said Cecil W. Forsberg, a professor at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, who helped developed the “Enviropig” with the cleaner manure. Smithfield Foods, for one, the world’s largest hog producer and pork processor, says it is doing no research on genetically engineered animals.

In East Texas, Residents Take On a Lake-Eating Monster

How this one-time steamboat landing on Caddo Lake got its name is, well, uncertain — as uncertain as the fate that now clouds this natural wonder, often called the state’s only honest lake.  With more submerged acreage than Minnesota, Texas has just 166 bodies of water commonly considered lakes. All but one of them, according to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, are artificial reservoirs, most created in the 1950s to fend off drought.  Now that one, Caddo Lake, a mystical preserve of centuries-old mossy cypress breaks, teeming fisheries and waterfowl habitats, is under siege by a fast-spreading, Velcro-like aquatic fern, Salvinia molesta, also known as Giant Salvinia.

 

In what East Texans here liken to a horror movie, the furry green invader from South America, which is infiltrating lakes in the American South and abroad to growing alarm, is threatening to smother the labyrinthine waterway, the largest natural lake in the South, covering about 35,000 acres and straddling Texas and Louisiana.

 

“It’s probably the most dire threat that the lake has ever faced, and we certainly have had more than our share of threats,” said Don Henley, the drummer, singer and songwriter of the Eagles, who grew up in nearby Linden, keeps a double-wide trailer on Caddo Lake and has put his celebrity and fortune behind efforts to preserve it.  The United States Geological Survey calls Salvinia molesta one of the world’s most noxious aquatic weeds, with an ability to double in size every two to four days and cover 40 square miles within three months, suffocating all life beneath. The plant is officially banned in the United States, but it is carried from lake to lake by oblivious boaters, to the point where some private lake communities now limit access to boats already there.

 

“It’s your classic 1950s drive-in-movie-monster plant,” said Jack Canson, director of a local preservation coalition and a former Hollywood scriptwriter who, under the pseudonym Jackson Barr, co-wrote a B-movie plant thriller, “Seedpeople,” released in 1992.

On Tuesday, Mr. Canson and six local waterway and community officials gathered around a table here to trade sightings of the weed and plan how to spend $240,000 appropriated by the Texas Legislature. “I started to put down yellow markers,” said Robert Speight, president of the lake association, showing a map stuck with yellow pins. But he said he gave up: “I ran out of yellow.”

 

With most of the growth spreading unchecked on the Louisiana side, where Texas residents say the authorities have been preoccupied with Hurricane Katrina recovery, local advocates raised $35,000 for a two-mile net, put up in June, to seal off Caddo Lake’s more contaminated eastern half.  “We just stuck our necks out,” said Paul Fortune, a contractor who has lived his whole life on the lake. “We just did it.” But propagating leaves still float through gaps left open for boats, and are spread by the boats themselves.

 

In one area of Louisiana, along a thicket of cypresses called the Big Green Brake, the Salvinia has already grown out into the lake as a luminescent green crust over the water. “It’s at the stage where it starts to lose its eerie beauty and starts to look like a real monster,” said Mr. Canson, the prow of his motorboat poking cracks in the matted covering like an icebreaker. Even flamethrowers have failed to kill it, he said. And beetles that devour the plant elsewhere die in the Texas cold.

 

Now chemical weapons have been thrown into the battle.

 

Mike Turner, a burly boat mechanic who calls himself part of the “Caddo Navy,” has set aside his business to go out daily in his small boat for $25 an hour to spray Salvinia infestations with a government-approved herbicide mixture of diquat and glyphosate and surfactants to make it stick to the leaves.

 

“It gets in the water hyacinth and it hides, like it’s a thinking animal,” said Mr. Turner, removing the surgical mask that protects him from the chemicals.

 

“I’m finding stuff that was not there two days ago,” he said, mopping his brow in the rising morning heat. He said he felt the task was hopeless at first and considered moving but changed his mind. When he was born 40 years ago, he said, his parents dipped his feet in the lake, and he did the same 12 years ago with his newborn daughter, Patte.

 

“I’m trying to preserve this for her and her grandchildren,” Mr. Turner said. “Who we are won’t mean a lot a hundred years from now; it’s what we leave behind.”

 

Ken Shaw, chairman of the Cypress Valley Navigation District and a retired paper executive with a home and boat on Caddo Lake, said that no matter what, he too was there to stay. “There’s nowhere else I’d rather be,” Mr. Shaw said. “If Salvinia takes over, so be it.”

 

Ingmar Bergman, Famed Director, Dies at 89

Ingmar Bergman, the “poet with the camera” who is considered one of the greatest directors in motion picture history, died today on the small island of Faro where he lived on the Baltic coast of Sweden, Astrid Soderbergh Widding, president of The Ingmar Bergman Foundation, said. Bergman was 89. Critics called Mr. Bergman one of the directors — the others being Federico Fellini and Akira Kurosawa — who dominated the world of serious film making in the second half of the 20th century.

Poland's oldest parachutist jumps at 84

Krystyna Zbyszynska, 84, became Poland's oldest parachutist when she made her first jump with her daughter-in-law, news channel TVN24 reported Sunday. "I survived World War Two and wasn't afraid, so what's there to be afraid of now?" she said after clambering out of her jumpsuit this weekend. "Babcia (granny) Krysia is not your ordinary gran," explained one of her teenaged granddaughters. "She tells me I'm not playing my music loud enough and comes into my room and wants to dance." Asked whether she planned another jump Zbyszynska, from the northern city of Olsztyn, told the channel: "Yes, the day I turn 100."

Clinton campaign insulted by cleavage article

Insulted by a fashion article about Hillary Clinton's cleavage, her presidential campaign is trying to use the incident to raise money.

 

A fund-raising e-mail letter signed by Ann Lewis, a senior Clinton adviser, urges potential donors to "take a stand against this kind of coarseness and pettiness in American culture."

 

The Washington Post on July 20 published an article by its fashion writer, Robin Givhan, that noted Clinton wore a black top with a low neckline during an appearance on the Senate floor to talk about the high cost of college education.

 

"It was startling to see that small acknowledgment of sexuality and femininity peeking out of the conservative -- aesthetically speaking -- environment of Congress," Givhan wrote.

 

Lewis wrote: "Would you believe that The Washington Post wrote a 746-word article on Hillary's cleavage?"

 

She said it was inappropriate for the news media to be "talking about body parts" and that the 2008 presidential campaign should be focused on the issues.

 

"Frankly, focusing on women's bodies instead of their ideas is insulting. It's insulting to every woman who has ever tried to be taken seriously in a business meeting. It's insulting to our daughters -- and our sons -- who are constantly pressured by the media to grow up too fast," Lewis said.

 

Cell phones light up operating room during blackout

The light from the cell phone screens allowed surgeons to complete an emergency appendix operation during a blackout in a city in central Argentina, reports said on Saturday.

 

Leonardo Molina, 29, was on the operating table on July 21, when the power went out in the Policlinico Juan D. Peron, the main hospital in Villa Mercedes, a small city in San Luis province.

 

"The generator, which should have been working correctly, didn't work," a hospital spokesman, whose name was not given, told TN television news station.

 

"The surgeons and anesthetists were in the dark... A family member got some cell phones together from people in the hallway and took them in to provide light," he said.

 

Ricardo Molina, 39, Leonardo's brother, told La Nacion newspaper that the lights were out for an hour and his brother's anesthesia was wearing off.

 

Hospital Director Dario Maurer told La Nacion the surgery was without light a maximum of 20 minutes.