Victor Surerus demonstrates how he used his first cell phone, purchased in 1985 for roughly $1800.JENNIFER ROBERTS
How on earth did Globe Tech HQ find the first cellphone customer in Canada?
Good question, Iain. And funnily enough, it's one I didn't originally want to answer.
We were planning a piece, here at Report on Business, on the 25th anniversary of wireless service in Canada. Cantel, which was funded in part by Ted Rogers and later became Rogers Wireless, and Bell Cellular, launched their wireless networks 25 years ago last week -- on July 1, 1985. It was a momentous occasion without which Canadian consumers would have no reason to gripe about bad service and high prices today.
Like many great ideas in journalism, this one surfaced in a bar ( Bar Wellington, Globe Tech HQ's local). One editor kind of paused, as if she had been socked in the gut by epiphany itself, and said, "Whoa. Wait. Why don't you try and find the first cellphone customer in Canada?"
I cringed. This is the type of idea that editors love and reporters despise: The iconic "first" or "only" or "best" of something, of which there can only be one -- rest assured! -- with no shades of grey or any nuance.
Like any good reporter should, I resisted instantly, as if I had been asked to score an exclusive interview with Kim Jong-il.
"What?! There is no first customer. There must have been thousands of non-paying 'customers' in a trial phase! What about all the technicians who scored free phones while they built the network? Don't they count? What about separate retail outlets that sold phones at the same time?!"
Unfortunately, these arguments held no water. I was doomed -- especially since another more senior editor overheard us and commanded it be done. The article, which I had been excited about, became a looming, nigh-impossible challenge. So I e-mailed Bell's PR guy, a man by the name of Mark, at 10 pm that night, pleading. I also sent an e-mail off to Rogers. Both replied and said they would see what they can do. I went to sleep with my fingers crossed.
By the next morning, things were looking grim. Rogers, which employs a historian, didn't have records that reached back that far. And Mark at Bell was frantically calling all corners of the sprawling Bell Canada Enterprises apparatus to find the customer.
Then Rogers got back to me and the question changed. What kind of first are you looking for? First phone call? First phone on the network?
"The first phone call," I thought. "That's even more interesting than the first customer!"
Art Eggleton, who was mayor of Toronto back in 1985, was approached by Ted Rogers to make the first, official call on the Cantel network on Canada Day. He was to call the then-mayor of Montreal, Jean Drapeau, who has since passed away.
I found this out by getting Art on his cellphone shortly after he touched down in London, England. He told me he couldn't talk for long because he was incurring roaming charges (he's still on Rogers, though he didn't buy a phone at first). I explained why I was calling him and asked if he recalled what he and M. Drapeau talked about. He laughed, saying he knew I would ask him that. Duh!
"I'm not sure what we talked about it. The weather. Smoked meat sandwiches, I think," he told me. "In perspective, now that I've seen how all this has evolved and how it dominates our world today, it was an awesome occasion. But I didn't think that at the time. I thought, 'I can't put this in my pocket.' It was too big. And there were all sorts of Canada Day celebrations going on."
This, of course, was before the iconic scene in Wall Street where Michael Douglas, wearing a housecoat and walking along an empty beach, talks to a youthful Charlie Sheen on an absurdly large phone. The thing was huge (and, by the way, it makes an appearance in Wall Street 2).
Then Bell got back to me: They had found a field technician, a man by the name of Philip Yhap, who helped build the first network in the early 80s, before I was even born. He was attacked by guard dogs at one point and was confronted with a massive black bear when he was installing telecom equipment in a shed near Huntsville, Ont. Like I suspected, he told me there were roughly one thousand pre-launch customers who were testing the wobbly network. But then, as we talked, he mentioned a guy by the name of Tim Barnett -- apparently the first person to make a call on the Bell network.
"Excellent!" I said. "Is he still around?"
"I think he left Bell about 20 years ago," Philip replied.
Gargh! I looked frantically, placed some calls and sent out some e-mails, and got nothing. The search continued fruitlessly. And then, all of a sudden, an e-mail from Mark.
Bell's people had tracked down the very closest thing to the first cellphone customer. He is as far back as the Bell records go -- and signed on in the summer of 85, making him the longest continuous customer at Bell and the earliest, as far as anyone can tell. He is, for all intents and purposes, the first cellphone customer in Canada. And his name is Victor. Victor Surerus.
"Same backwards as it is forwards," he told me.
He lives in the small Roseneath, Ont., and his first phone was a "bag phone." I spoke to him several times and the Globe dispatched a photographer that took an awesome picture of him that kind of looks like this famous painting.
Piece of cake. Case closed.
All I need now is an ambitious editor to wonder out loud who's the first Canadian Hotmail user...