Woj Bomb (Courtesy of Schefter)

It's funny, I was covering a baseball game - high school playoff, back in the day. Game ends on a walk-off HR. Kid on the losing team waits around for awhile after I get some quotes for the story. He wasn't a baseball star - basketball was his sport. We chose him as an athlete of the week earlier that year. He was an interesting kid, talked about Paul Robeson being one of his heroes in the profile I wrote. Anyway - the guy waited around to thank me for the profile, said it got him a basketball scholarship to Columbia. One of the highlights of my time covering high school sports. I still think about that guy.

 

Yeah, you could kinda reverse the wires and plug it directly into the phone's wall outlet. It was the norm that when I got into a hotel room, I'd have to move the beds to get access to the phone plug outlet. It was a pain in the ass, but was a time-saver because you always got a good connection.
The worst was trying to use the couplers to send from Olympic Stadium in Montreal after a game. They used loud blowers to clean up the stadium and the noise would interfere with the transmission.

 

First time using trash-80 with couplers was the 1983 Liberty Bowl, Doug Flutie's BC vs. Gerry Faust's Notre Dame, for the Boston Phoenix. ND won when BC kicker shanked an extra point. A week of freezing cold and ice in Memphis. On the plus side: Phoenix was a weekly, so I went back to the hotel and could use my room phone to file. On the minus side: Phoenix was a weekly, gave me huge space. Used up memory, had to file half and start over. On the super minus side: Couplers stopped functioning at this point. Had to call my best friend editor at home very late and dictate. Showing he was a better newspaper man than I, we remained friends.

 

I had to dictate about half the time from out of town football games. Never even had the couplers.

 

Yeah, it was always better to use a wall line/phone plug if you could (I have those among my accessories, too!). But if you were stuck with a pay phone, or, as long as you had the old-style desk phone, it was great having the couplers. I was pretty lucky with them and didn't usually have problems. I used them often, and they almost always worked. I made of point of taking care of my stuff and the TRS-100 and all its accompanying equipment really is still in almost pristine condition. If it had a newspaper office system to communicate with anymore, I'm confident it would work.