Character Telephone Exhibit

The Jefferson Barracks Telephone Museum is running its Character Telephone Exhibit on Sunday, October 18, from 9 AM to 2 PM. It's a recurring feature, so if you can't make this particular Sunday, there'll be more dates. The draw is exactly what it sounds like: telephones shaped like Winnie-the-Pooh, R2-D2, Big Bird, and Kermit the Frog. It's the kind of thing that's hard to describe without sounding a bit ridiculous, but seeing a Kermit phone in person is a different story.

That's just the novelty side of things, though. The museum itself is housed in a restored 1896 building inside the historic Jefferson Barracks Park, and the collection goes way beyond the character phones. You'll find telephones made from the late 1800s through the 2010s, hundreds of pieces of telephone equipment and memorabilia from the 1880s to the 2000s, and military telephones from World War I through the Gulf War. It's a long look at how we've talked to each other over more than a century, from the heavy, wired machines of the early days to the stuff that looks familiar. The museum leans on hands-on, how-things-work exhibits, so it's as much about seeing how the gear actually functioned as it is about looking at the objects themselves.

If you're into engineering or just curious about how we got from hand-cranked boxes to the phones we carry in our pockets, it's a good spot to spend a morning. The character phones are the hook, but the rest of the collection gives you the full picture. The exhibit runs from 9 AM to 2 PM on Sunday, October 18, at 12 Hancock Ave in Saint Louis, and admission is free to $5.