Dial-Tone Phreak

This was in the early 1950s. He was still Josef Engressia then, born in Richmond, Va., and phones were solid objects.

"Lots of scary sounds and stuff at night," he'd say, years later. "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."

At 7, with his perfectly pitched ear, he heard through the receiver the tone that controlled long-distance connections, 2,600 cycles per second. "I started whistling along with it," he said, "and all of a sudden the circuit cut off, and I did it again, and it cut off again. And gradually... I figured out - back in the mid-'50s - just how to do it."

In 1971, Ron Rosenbaum, in his landmark Esquire article, called him "the original granddaddy phone phreak," though he was only 22.

Children love telephones. Joybubbles, who was 5 years old when he died this year, and 5 years old the year before that, 5 years old for almost 20 years, was no exception.

When Joybubbles died, Steven Gibb arranged a telephone memorial, a sort of Quaker service over phone lines, a conference call four hours long with 50 people telling stories.