A Guelph/Eramosa man’s lifelong passion first began by watching the TV show Lassie when he was 10 years old.
It wasn’t the dog that piqued 63-year-old Paul Axman’s interest but the family’s old telephone.
“They always had this old wooden phone in the kitchen and the phone would ring and they’d pick it up and I thought ‘that’s pretty cool, I’ve never seen a phone like that,’” Axman said in an interview at his home workshop.
Axman’s father then informed him this is the kind of phone his grandparents still used at their farm in Saskatchewan.
A letter to his grandma was returned with an old phone showing up in the mail and that started it all.
A single historic phone has turned into a more than 50-year long collection of all things telephone.
This collection is stored in a two-storey workshop that sits on his property and is filled with landlines, old wooden phones, switchboards, documents and more.
Axman said there is a community of collectors but they’ll often focus on specific things. He has just about everything.
“Anything related to telephone history pretty well I’ll gather up,” Axman said.
He used to find pieces at auctions and flea markets but increasingly is finding word of mouth is the go-to method.
“Somebody will call and say ‘I understand you collect stuff...we got a family member that worked for the telephone company or we found this cleaning out a house,’” Axman said. “Some stuff you sort of solicit when you know where it is and other times it just falls in your lap.”
Axman does not collect cell phones, he uses a simple flip phone for calling and has poor cell service at his property.
“There’s not much you can do with it, you can look at it but I can’t play with it,” Axman said, referring to why he’s not interested in cell phones.
This ability to play with telephones, by hooking them up to a switchboard for example, is what Axman said initially drew him in and led to a career right out of high school.
“When I got out of high school, I started working for Bell, so I worked there for 37 years and that’s when they were getting rid of all this stuff and putting the digital equipment in,” Axman said.
He isn’t just a collector, but an encyclopedia of knowledge on this topic which led to him getting an exhibit called Talk to Me! at the Wellington County Museum and Archives.
Axman said this came about when he went to the opening of the Wightman exhibit and was introduced by Blair Wightman, co-owner of Clifford-based independent Wightman Telecom, to curator Amy Dunlop.
Dunlop ended up being the curator of the exhibit and called Axman a well-respected telephone historian in an email statement.
“Paul Axman’s collection is so varied from tools and equipment used to fix the telephone line to a full representation of early telephones used across Ontario,” Dunlop said.
“Paul’s passion for these items and the important history behind them is what drew me to work with him in our Wellington County Collects exhibit programme held at Wellington County Museum and Archives. Wellington County Collects is about showcasing local collectors’ stories with an emphasis on the history behind these items and their local, regional and national importance to the Wellington County story.”
Axman said he isn’t as aggressive as he used to be with his collection which he thinks might be an age-related thing.
However, Axman appeared very proud of his collection, even if his workshop looks, as he described, like a bomb went off.
“Boy collecting stamps is sure a hell of a lot easier than this,” Axman said.
