JAD: Hey, I'm Jab Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab. And today we're talking about ...

ROBERT: Escape.

JAD: Escape.

ROBERT: And in this last story, I have a feeling that this guy actually does kind of make it through. This is a true ...

JAD: Yeah, I think he does.

ROBERT: ... honest escape. But he does it in the most original and most unusual way.

JAD: Here with the story is our producer Sean Cole.

SEAN COLE: So the story starts in the late '50s. There was this little boy in Richmond, Virginia named Joe Engressia Jr. He's seven or eight years old, and he's just sitting at home dialing various numbers on his parents' telephone just to see what happens.

PHIL LAPSLEY: He was on a long distance call to information. You know, 555-1212 and just an area code.

SEAN: This is Phil Lapsley. I first heard Joe's story from him.

PHIL LAPSLEY: And he heard very faintly in the background a tone, and he just started whistling along with it, and all of a sudden he heard a ker-chink and the call went away.

SEAN: And it turns out that the tone in the background of the phone and his corresponding whistle was 2,600 Hertz.

PHIL LAPSLEY: Musically, it's about seventh octave E.

JAD: So he has perfect pitch?

SEAN: Yeah. And he was weirdly smart, as you'll soon discover. Anyway, he thinks to himself...

PHIL LAPSLEY: "That's very odd. Well, that happened once. I wonder if it'd happen again."

SEAN: Does it again ...

PHIL LAPSLEY: He didn't even really know exactly what it was at the time.

SEAN: But he does it again and again.

PHIL LAPSLEY: He didn't think it was particularly useful for anything. He does talk about walking past somebody at a payphone when he was seven or eight years old and whistling this tone and having the phone call disconnect on the person.

ROBERT: Wow! That's like having super powers.

JAD: That really is.

ROBERT: Yeah! Which means he could be a little walking bomb. He could go to Grand Central Station, where there are many people sitting in phone booths, and he could make them all lose their phone calls. And no one would know.

SEAN: Right. But it was more than just a cool trick for him. This discovery was the beginning of a kind of escape.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Engressia, Jr.: What were you scared of when you were little? I bet something scared you, because there was things that sure scared me.]

SEAN: That's Joe.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Engressia, Jr.: I don't remember how old I was, but ...]

SEAN: It's all we have left of him, in fact. He died in 2007. But he left behind hours and hours of recordings of his voice, phone recordings. As you listen to them ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Engressia, Jr.: I was afraid, you know, something might happen. I crawled out the bed, found books on the floor and kissed it.]

SEAN: ... you pretty quickly realize that the little boy in that room who was playing with the phone, he was kind of desperate.

JAD: Really?

SEAN: He went to this Catholic school for the blind.

ROBERT: Was he blind?

SEAN: He was born blind.

ROBERT: Wow.

SEAN: And when he was there ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Engressia, Jr.: Back in the fall of 1955 ...]

SEAN: ... things got pretty bad.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Engressia, Jr.: A lot of the nuns whipped me and my sister really hard, you know, and shook us. Only one did the sexual abuse. She used to have me get on the table, and then she would get up on the table and lie down and she did the bad touching.]

SEAN: Things were pretty bad at home, too.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Engressia, Jr.: Daddy would slam mother and hurt her and break things, and there would be lots of scary sounds and stuff at night. Sometimes I'd hug my phone up close and listen to the dial tone. The soft hum of the dial tone that was always there.]

PHIL LAPSLEY: It was a nice, warm tone. It never yelled. It never fought.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Engressia, Jr.: What a wonderful thing a telephone is.]

PHIL LAPSLEY: It was just a nice way for him to comfort himself.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Engressia, Jr.: Especially during those long nights.]

JAD: And so how exactly did the whistling thing he was doing ...?

ROBERT: How did that help him?

JAD: Yeah.

SEAN: Well, it takes a few steps to explain, but it turns out that that tone was the keyword in a hidden mechanical language that controlled the phone system. He wasn't supposed to be able to hear it at all, in fact. It was an internal signal, probably bleeding over from another line.

PHIL LAPSLEY: And when a long distance line was idle, when there was no call on it, this tone would be being played continuously.

SEAN: Basically, the tone means that the line is free, and silence on the line means there's someone trying to make a call. So say you're in New York and you want to call LA. You pick up your phone ...

PHIL LAPSLEY: The circuit's got this tone on it marking the circuit as idle.

SEAN: You dial the LA number, and at that point your line ...

PHIL LAPSLEY: Takes away the tone for just a moment.

SEAN: It goes silent. And LA goes, "Ah!"

PHIL LAPSLEY: "New York wants to make a phone call."

SEAN: And then LA drops its tone, and the New York and LA machines talk to each other. So that's one discovery. Another discovery is that you can dial a phone by just tapping the hook switch, that little button where you hang up. Tap that three times, dial the number 3. Seven times, dial the number 7. And so then Joe thought, "Wait. Pulses, tones ..."

PHIL LAPSLEY: "Maybe if you were to make little bursts of tone—" so something like ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Engressia, Jr.: [whistles] For six. [whistles] for two.]

SEAN: As Joe demonstrated on a web show called Haxor Radio.

ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Engressia, Jr.: [whistles] For nine.]

PHIL LAPSLEY: If you were to do something like that, maybe you can actually dial a call.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, radio host: Are you whistling that over the phone?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Engressia, Jr.: Yeah.]

SEAN: And you could.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, radio host: I'm impressed.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Engressia, Jr.: That's how you actually make a call.]

SEAN: That's exactly how the phone system used to send calls back and forth. That was its language.

PHIL LAPSLEY: That's right. Joe learned how to speak telephone.

SEAN: Which is amazing. I mean, I think that's amazing.

JAD: But isn't he just dialing the phone with his lips as opposed to using his fingers?

SEAN: Yes. True. But Joe made one more little discovery that would change his life forever.

PHIL LAPSLEY: See, if you first dialed a number like long distance information, 555-1212, the telephone company doesn't charge for calls for information.

SEAN: So what he figured out was that once you get the operator on the line, if you then whistled to disconnect ...

PHIL LAPSLEY: But only for a little bit, only for a second or two ...

SEAN: The line nearly disconnects, but it doesn't all the way. It just sits in this kind of limbo waiting for instructions, waiting to be used.

JAD: Huh.

SEAN: And you can ...

PHIL LAPSLEY: Reroute your call by whistling the digits you wanted to dial ...

SEAN: And make a free call.

PHIL LAPSLEY: Because the phone company again thinks that you're still connected to information, and it's not charging you for that.

SEAN: It was like having an unlimited plane ticket to anywhere. Joe could call anywhere he wanted for free.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, phone operator: This is a telecom announcement.]

SEAN: And explore.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, phone operator: The number you have called is not connected.]

SEAN: And listen. And so he started calling all over the world, even broken number numbers just to hear the different voices.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, phone operator: Please check the number before calling again.]

ROBERT: I used to do this, by the way.

JAD: Did you really?

ROBERT: My sister and I would get on the phone. We could call information—that was a free service.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: And we said, "Hello, information. Can you please contact us with Toronto?" And then we'd get the Toronto operator. And then we'd say, "Toronto, could you please get us in contact with Churchill, Ontario?" Which is way up north. Then the Churchill lady would come on and I'd say, "Could you please put us in touch with [inaudible]?" Which is some Inuit place. And they'd transfer you to the northern-est place. We'd be talking to a person in the Arctic for nothing.

JAD: Wow!

ROBERT: It was the sense of going long distance for free.

SEAN: Now imagine you're a blind kid doing that in an abusive home. You can't even run away.

PHIL LAPSLEY: I think the phone represented freedom. It represented a place that was under his control. He could be an expert in it. You know, it was a place that he could do all sorts of things that maybe he wasn't so easily able to do in real life.

JAD: So what happens next?

SEAN: So things get a bit better for Joe as he gets older. His mom takes him out of the Catholic school once she finds out that the nuns are beating him. He never told his parents about the sexual abuse. He gets more and more savvy with the phone, and then finally he goes off to the University of South Florida, where he starts showing off.

PHIL LAPSLEY: It started out that Joe told a student that he could whistle a free phone call and the student said, "No you can't." And he said, "Wanna bet?" So they bet a dollar and Joe whistled a long distance call for him. And before long, there were crowds of 40 kids who were following him around wanting to see him do this parlor trick.

SEAN: And then he whistled up this one particular fateful call.

PHIL LAPSLEY: He was trying to whistle somebody in New York, which is area code 516, but instead he wound up in Canada, which is 514. You can see if you're whistling calls you could easily get off by one or two beeps. So he wound up talking to an operator in Canada, and the operator in Canada put his call through to New York, but then actually managed to listen to the call, and the student was talking about the whiz kid who put the call through for him. And telephone company security ended up tracing it back to University of South Florida.

SEAN: It was just a gossipy operator who told on him.

PHIL LAPSLEY: Well, gossipy or security conscious, depending on how you view it.

SEAN: Fun-ruining, that's how I view it.

PHIL LAPSLEY: [laughs]

SEAN: So Joe's busted. He nearly gets kicked out of school, and the whole thing causes just enough of a stir that people found out.

PHIL LAPSLEY: The local school newspaper wrote an article about it, and it got picked up by a wire service. Next thing you know, there are newspaper articles and publicity, and ...

SEAN: And here's the weird thing. As the news travels ...

PHIL LAPSLEY: "Did you see the article about the blind kid in Florida who can do this?"

SEAN: ... it turns out Joe wasn't alone. There were all of these other Joe Engressias out there hacking the phone system too.

PHIL LAPSLEY: "You mean I'm not the only one? You mean, there are other people who are interested in this as well?"

SEAN: They weren't whistling. Some of them would use these little machines called blue boxes that would make the tones. A couple of kids actually modified a toy whistle from a box of Captain Crunch. And because Joe got caught, they all started to find out about each other.

PHIL LAPSLEY: That really ended up being the focal point for a whole generation of phone phreaks.

[NEWS CLIP: This is NBC Nightly News.]

JAD: Phone what?

SEAN: Phone phreaks.

[NEWS CLIP: Phone phreaks will tell you that phone phreaking began with a blind young man named Joe Engressia. One thing he discovered was that he could whistle his own calls.]

PHIL LAPSLEY: And before long, people were actually calling Joe Engressia, and a network starts to form. Then the phone phreaks started finding broken, vacant number recordings. So for example, you dial a non-working number and you get the usual telephone company recording ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, phone operator: You have reached a non-working number.]

PHIL LAPSLEY: But it turns out that some of those were broken in such a way that the volume level was very low, and if multiple people called the same number they could talk. Teenage kids would call and it turned into a party line. Kind of an annoying one, because you had this announcement that was repeating every 30 seconds, but it still allowed teenage kids to talk to one another.

JAD: Wow. So this is it. I mean, he found his tribe, basically.

SEAN: Yeah. And he would call the conference lines and talk with them about phones and phreaking and everything, but that really wasn't what he was after.

PHIL LAPSLEY: And I think it's an interesting thing because so say you're a lonely kid and you start playing around with the phone, or you start playing around with Scrabble, or whatever it is. You get really obsessed about some thing, right? Through the magic of that thing, you end up meeting other people. You sort of have a choice to make at that point. Choice one is: embrace the community. Choice two is: well, that's nice. It's great that there are other people and I get some stuff from that but, you know, I've found this thing, my telephone, my Scrabble set, whatever it is I'm obsessed by, and I'm still obsessed by it. And it seems to me like he sort of made the choice to go for the thing.

SEAN: It's not that he didn't like the community, but he was still searching for something.

JAD: Hmm.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Engressia, Jr.: Esquire Magazine. 1971.]

PHIL LAPSLEY: March of 1971 is when he moved to Memphis.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Engressia, Jr.: Reporter. "In that month, he had done very little long distance phone phreaking from his own phone. He had begun to apply for a job with the phone company."]

PHIL LAPSLEY: Yeah, he went there intending to "Get a job and be a man," as he put it.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Engressia, Jr.: And he wanted to stay away from anything illegal. Engressia, quote, "Any kind of job will do. Anything as menial as the most lowly operator. That's probably all they'd give me because I'm blind."]

STEVEN GIBB: He wanted to be a telephone man. He wanted to take his lunchbox to work. He wanted to get a paycheck. He wanted to be a real person like everybody else.

SEAN: This is Steven Gibb, one of Joe's best friends.

STEVEN GIBB: He lived in a couple places. The first one was, you know, just imagine skid row. I mean, it was. You know, he woke up one morning when the heat went out and he stepped on a dead, frozen rat because he ended up sleeping in his coat. I mean, that's all he could afford.

SEAN: And he can't get arrested in Memphis. He can't get a job to save his life. So he decides to get arrested, literally, by doing this very, very elaborate public phreak where he gets a bunch of his phreaking friends on a conference call and he starts dialing up foreign embassies.

STEVEN GIBB: Like the armed services in Moscow.

SEAN: And pretended that he was calling as a radio host, and that all of his friends were his studio audience.

STEVEN GIBB: "Hi. This is so and so from this radio show. Do you have time to talk and be on the air with us today? Oh great!"

PHIL LAPSLEY: Because he wanted to stay on the phone line so that the phone company could trace him, because as says, "They're not really speedy."

STEVEN GIBB: He wanted to give them a lot of time to catch him.

PHIL LAPSLEY: Two weeks later is when he walked out the door and the FBI came up, said, "Joseph Engressia?"

JAD: And why did he do this? Because he was trying to get the phone company to pay attention or something?

SEAN: That's right. That's right.

ROBERT: In the hopes that he would get a free meal in jail?

SEAN: No, in the hopes that he would get a job.

JAD: With the phone company?

SEAN: That's right.

ROBERT: What a weird way to go about it.

SEAN: And amazingly, it worked.

ROBERT: [gasps] Really?

SEAN: Yeah.

PHIL LAPSLEY: He got four job offers.

SEAN: All phone jobs.

PHIL LAPSLEY: So he got a job at a little independent Millington Telephone Company.

SEAN: And he started cleaning telephones.

PHIL LAPSLEY: Anything from cleaning phones to servicing equipment.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Engressia, Jr.: Any kind of job will do.]

SEAN: But any kind of job wouldn't do.

PHIL LAPSLEY: He really didn't like it.

SEAN: It's that kind of thing where you realize your lifelong dream, and then you think, "Wait, I can dream anything I want. I can dream bigger than this."

PHIL LAPSLEY: And so in 1975 ...

STEVEN GIBB: In '76.

PHIL LAPSLEY: Whatever. He moved to Denver.

SEAN: Denver, where every dream is in reach. Paid for by the Committee to Promote Denver.

STEVEN GIBB: He started hobnobbing with all the telephone guys, and going to the public utilities commission. And that's when he started working for Mountain Bell.

PHIL LAPSLEY: Mountain Bell Telephone.

SEAN: And that's when he started phreaking for The Man.

PHIL LAPSLEY: So he worked as a network troubleshooter.

SEAN: And at this point, he had such an intimate knowledge of all the little clicks and pops of the phone system that he could ...

PHIL LAPSLEY: ... tell from those noises what was going on in the network, how your call was being routed, if there was a problem somewhere along the line what the problem was.

SEAN: Maybe even where it was.

JAD: Wow!

SEAN: Strictly from listening.

PHIL LAPSLEY: Strictly from listening.

SEAN: This was listening to the dial tone times nirvana.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Engressia, Jr.: Now it should go through.]

SEAN: And he demonstrated his powers on the New York radio station WBAI. There was a show called Off the Hook.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joe Engressia, Jr.: That good old ring. Notice the click. That one. Now it'll answer briefly. Now it'll go funny. See, and now it'll stay like that as long as you want to stay on it. It's a nice sound. [singing] Oh, it drops off on number five ESS, I forgot.]

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: Wow, he's like a Jedi master!

SEAN: Yeah, he's made it.

ROBERT: Yeah.

SEAN: And so he quit.

JAD: What?

SEAN: Gave up the job for his friend.

JAD: But it sounds like he finally got what he wanted.

SEAN: I think he became the master of the world that he had escaped into, but he never really dealt with the world that he had escaped from.

ROBERT: Meaning what?

SEAN: That little boy, that broken little boy that he was, still needed a kind of fixing in a way that wasn't gonna be—you know, no job is really gonna solve that.

ROBERT: So ...

SEAN: So he moves to Minneapolis on June 12—because 612 was Minneapolis's area code—and he basically becomes a kid again.

STEVEN GIBB: Yeah, just everything he did from that point on, other than his phone, had to do with children.

SEAN: He'd visit with children who were terminally ill. He'd just visit with children in general.

STEVEN GIBB: I've got a recording at home. In fact, I was listening to it last night before I came to the interview. I was laughing and giggling because all these little girls were coming up and they were saying, "Hi! Hi!"

[ARCHIVE CLIP, girls: Hi, hi, hi, hi, hi, hi, hi, hi, hi, hi, hi, hi.]

STEVEN GIBB: And I could hear the parents in the back saying ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, parent: Don't sit on all of his stuff.]

STEVEN GIBB: ... "Don't sit on his toys." And he actually started talking a little more to me about his being abused and missing out on his childhood. And he was at a seminar, an uplifting seminar, and the instructor said something on the order of—I'm paraphrasing—tell me how you feel right now. And he screamed and yelled and threw up his arms and said, "Joybubbles!"

SEAN: And in that moment, he decided that he would actually go by that name: Joybubbles.

JAD: You mean he changed his name?

SEAN: He legally changed his name to Joybubbles—all one word. And it was around this time that he decided and announced that he wasn't going to be an adult any more.

STEVEN GIBB: His old name and his past was gone and he wanted to be five years old.

SEAN: Five years old forever. And then he started doing this.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joybubbles: Gosh, it's May already. Well, I'm glad you've called Stories and Stuff. This is your storyteller, Joybubbles, here in Minneapolis, Minnesota.]

SEAN: You know those recordings I mentioned at the beginning, they're all from this show that Joe recorded every week. He called it Stories and Stuff. And instead of broadcasting it, he'd record the episodes to an answering service, and then you'd call a number and listen to it on the phone.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joybubbles: Hello kids and chidults. I think a chidult is part child and part adult.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joybubbles: Well, hello. Hi, and hello. This is Stories and Stuff.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joybubbles: You've reached Stories and Stuff. This is Joybubbles here in Minneapolis. That's all one word. Don't you dare split it. Joybubbles.]

SEAN: And this may be too armchair-psychoanalytical, but it really feels as though it's the kind of show that he needed to hear when he was a kid. Like, the new five year old was trying to go back and say something to the five year old from the early '50s, something akin to, "It's okay. In the end, it's gonna be okay."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Joybubbles: There is help. If you'd like an imaginary friend, a bunch of them come that are looking for somebody to love and play with and talk to. And so all you have to do is any quiet day, just get quiet and ask for one. Know that the kind you like will come. And they'll be with you for as long as you want them, as long as you need them, for lifetime and beyond.]

ROBERT: Thanks to producer Sean Cole.

JAD: And to Steven Gibb and to Phil Lapsley, who has now finished a book on phreaking. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Thanks for listening.

[LISTENER: Message four. New.]

[PHIL LAPSLEY: Hey, kids. This is Phil Lapsley in Bangalore, India. Here goes. Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad.]

[STEVEN GIBB: Our staff includes: Ellen Horne, Soren Wheeler, Pat Walters, Tim Howard ...]

[ANN DRUYAN: ... Brenna Farrell, Lynn Levy and Sean Cole.]

[PHIL LAPSLEY: With help from Dylan Keefe, Brendan McMullen and Raphaella Bennin.]

[MERAV OPHER: Raphaella Bennin. Special thanks ...]

[PHIL LAPSLEY: ... to Jeff Spurgeon ...]

[MERAV OPHER: ... Rachel Morrison ...]

[STEVEN GIBB: ... Robert Feinstein, and everyone ...]

[MERAV OPHER: ... everyone ...]

[PHIL LAPSLEY: ... everyone ...]

[ANN DRUYAN: ... everyone ...]

[PHIL LAPSLEY: ... everyone at Phonetrips.com.]

[ANN DRUYAN: Thanks, guys. Bye bye.]

[PHIL LAPSLEY: Bye bye!]

 

-30-

 

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