... the Telecan booth?
At least that's what I call it. I seem to remember that most of the Neighborhood of Make Believe used tin cans for phones, or the telecan, as they were called, though Miss Paulificate uses a very traditional telephone, as does Daniel (in episode 1509 at least). Normally the telecan's would be at each characters individual home. Someone needing to make a call would just reach below the set and retrieve a can on a string and place the call. But usually if it was one of the human characters who needed to make the call, they'd go to the telecan booth. This very 70's contraption, is something I remember seeing quite a bit back when I was younger. I had thought that it was relegated to those older episodes and no longer shown in the current batch, when lo and behold, during the Music episode, # 1550, Lady Aberlin uses the "booth" to phone Westwood. She simply walks over to an empty space in front of X and Henrietta's tree, looks up and the thing lowers out of the sky. The booth itself is comprised of several orange and brown (or are they pink and black?) vertical shapes arranged around hoops to give it a roughly cylinderical feel. The lowest hoop seems to be at Lady A's chest, so it reminds me of an old fashioned diving bell, enveloping the users upper body in a protective bubble. She reaches up and pulls a white tin can on a cord from the top of the booth As she talks she kind of leans on that lower hoop and you can see the booth move and sway on whatever it's hanging from. Then when she's done she returns the can to it's place and lifts the booth over her head as she exits. It then silently raises out of camera view.
One thing I always noticed as a kid was the noise that the can made as someone would pull it from the top of the booth. You could tell that the cord that it was on was retractable by the sounds that it made coming out and going back into place. In fact, Lady A very clearly holds the can tightly as it retracts and I would suspect that if she didn't the thing would have been snatched back and probably made quite a bit of noise.
Does anyone else have any memories of the Telecan Booth? How about it's first introduction? Did Corny make it? Did it just appear one day? Does anyone remember any sort of call or rhyme that they used to use to summon the booth? I can't remember if there was one or not. Let us know!
This very nice piece of Mister Rogers history showed up on eBay this past week. What you see is a copy of the sheet music published in 1955 for the Children's Corner song Goodnight God. You may remember this song title appearing later on the LP 
Back in 1986 an LP was released by Johnny Costa featuring his piano interpretations of many popular songs from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood -- the album was appropriately titled Johnny Costa Plays Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. Eugene Chadbourne of the All Music Guide comments that "If jazzing something up means to make it more lively and more entertaining, then listeners who might run for their lives if the Mister Rogers' Neighborhood show came on might be convinced that a fine jazz pianist such as Johnny Costa could make exciting music out of the Fred Rogers songbook."
