Intercom systems at school

[crt89]

I remember I was always interested in the intercom system at school. In elementary school I remember the system had rectangular speaker grilles in each classroom and on one side a square clock with black frame was mounted. I remember seeing the control system at the front desk and the microphone for it. It also had a radio mounted somewhere on it.

I can remember a couple funny moments with it. Once, someone in the office somehow managed to play the radio through the system for a moment. The song was If You See My Reflection by Fleetwood Mac. Another time I remember some fall related music being played on purpose for a fall event we were having.

The high school units were similar but had older-looking clocks on the speakers that I think said DuKane on them.

We did not have a bell system for class changes, the speakers would play a "Beeeeeep" when it was time to change class.

[centralradio]

I remember seeing the main PA unit at my elementary and middle school.Cant recall what the brand names were.both probably tube unit since it was about 35 to 45 years ago.I remember the middle school had a AM/FM tuner as I seen it there .They used too play the tuner before school starts in the morning and probably later after school when the janitors clean.A couple of times they had the local country station that I listened at home on.As I remember the speakers were on the wall and the call switch was by the class room light switches and thermostat. Great to hear Fleetwood Mac.I love that band.Great classic rock.

i never got a chance to see my high school PA setup.

[maxhifi]

My school was Bogen, I believe... Nothing special, typical intercom. The clocks though were those IBM clocks which tick back one minute and then forward two, every minute. Always felt like time was going backwards watching them work.

[Jon A.]

I'm sure I saw the PA system at my high school many times. It was right next to the entrance to the main office (most of the time I went through there voluntarily, I wasn't a troublemaker). As I recall it had quite a large panel. The school was built in 1957 but I have no idea if the system was original. The classroom speakers were just light-colored wooden boxes that angled forward in the front and had a speaker grille made of lighter-colored cloth, divided into three sections by the wood. We did have a bell system for class changes, BUT the PA system was activated as well, making a sound similar to a bicycle horn, about five short bursts, loud enough to be heard clearly but not be annoying. On a side note, one of my teachers had a rather odd hyphenated surname; whenever she was called on the PA, most of the class would laugh.

If only I could get a look at some old yearbooks; the building was demolished in 2003. Anyone who has ever seen Trailer Park Boys may have seen the school; it appeared in a season 3 episode in which Ricky and a few kids were stealing barbecues. His infamous 1975 New Yorker was on the scene as well. This was after the school had closed due to mold problems. A few students and teachers got sick because of this; I wasn't among them though. In 2000 the school was shut down for significant repairs and upgrades to deliver current curriculum. The original cost estimate for this was 8 million; at last count the cost was 12 million and rising. The sign at the end of the driveway remained for some time after demolition; it once joked the school was missing and a reward was offered.

[Celt]

My high school was built in 1963 and had what was then, considered a state of the art intercom system. Each room had it's own speaker with a direct connection to the principal's office and the hallway had several square brushed aluminum clocks that were synchronized by the office. The intercom also had a turntable that rarely got used except around Christmas, when they would play cheezy seasonal music.

[crt89]

The newer buildings at my high school had black square speakers that said Bogen on them and they didn't have any clocks on them. Those rooms just had battery powered Ingraham clocks on the wall.

I seem to remember in middle school, they had the buttons on the wall in each room that would call the office, and when the teacher left the room, some kids would press the button and the lady would get mad and tell them to stop it.

The intercom in elementary school, the radio looked like an aftermarket car stereo with a cassette player on it.

[jsowers]

My high school was built in 1953 and they had the auditorium PA speakers as part of the school intercom system. They were the same light-colored cases but larger, with 12" speakers, wall-mounted on each side of the stage. The stage had a floor jack for a balanced mike and they still had the original Electro-Voice 664 mike and sleeve-action stand, kept in a closet in the office. This was 25 years after the school was built and it still worked OK.

Later I worked in technology for the school system and got to see many of the intercom systems, but thankfully didn't have to work on them. Rauland made many of the ones we had and most had record players and radios that were seldom used. Some of the later installations in the 1980s had CD changers and car cassette/AM/FM radios mounted in a rack at the head end, usually the media center. Those were mostly used in the summer when the custodians would refinish the floors.

One elementary school had flush mounted speakers outside, facing the bus lot and the front entrance. Their intercom would always make a "ding-dong" sound before an announcement and it was controlled by phones on the office desks. Once I had a secretary so eager to see me fix her computer problem one summer that she called my name and welcomed me to the school with the intercom on my way up the sidewalk!

The elementary school buildings built in the late 1970s had light beige manual SC 554 wall phones next to each classroom door, to call the office. The office and media center had a 2500-type touch-tone phone that could call any of those classroom phones. All that has been replaced with Cisco IP phones now, but they still have speakers in the classrooms for announcements. The IP phones can work that way in a pinch, but the speakers aren't capable of enough volume for the entire room.

IP phones really changed things for the better in the classroom. Now every teacher has voice mail and can make and receive outside calls without leaving the classroom. Important people have DID numbers so the secretary doesn't have to field all the calls and every extension can call every other extension in the school system.

But every now and then we had problems like when one secretary accidentally forwarded all the school calls to a local restaurant. Or someone would mis-dial 911 and hang up. We had software that would tell us which extension that was.

[Dude111]

The intercom system @ my skewl wasnt filtered well.... If you picked up the phone and just listenend (w/o pressing for the office),you could hear other ppl using it (Very faintly)

[CoogarXR]

I went to 6 different schools growing up...

I remember one intercom system at one of the elementary schools. I remember because they upgraded it, and the old one sat in the back hallway (the hallway that you took from the lunch room to the playground). It had to be an 8ft long console covered in probably 50-80 toggle switches. We'd flip a bunch of switches as we walked past, lol.

That school also had the big stainless 8" ceiling speakers with a metal diffuser cone that was suspended below the grille. It was a two-way system; the office could call a room, and the teacher could just shout back and the speaker either acted as a mic or there was a mic up there too. Nifty stuff for the time.

My junior-high was built in the 1870s, and it had a lot of cool old woodwork, and they tried to integrate the speakers into the flow of the woodwork. Matching boxes, matching stain, kinda cool. They just tore that one down a couple years ago. I never got to see the console there.

High school, I couldn't tell you what we had. I was too busy looking at other stuff, lol.

[centralradio]

Originally Posted by Dude111

The intercom system @ my skewl wasnt filtered well.... If you picked up the phone and just listenend (w/o pressing for the office),you could hear other ppl using it (Very faintly)

Filtering.That reminds my of the old Kmart here in town.Every time they key it up.You get blasted with a 60 Hz hum through out the entire store.A bad ground somewhere.

[centralradio]

Originally Posted by CoogarXR

I went to 6 different schools growing up...

I remember one intercom system at one of the elementary schools. I remember because they upgraded it, and the old one sat in the back hallway (the hallway that you took from the lunch room to the playground). It had to be an 8ft long console covered in probably 50-80 toggle switches. We'd flip a bunch of switches as we walked past, lol.

That school also had the big stainless 8" ceiling speakers with a metal diffuser cone that was suspended below the grille. It was a two-way system; the office could call a room, and the teacher could just shout back and the speaker either acted as a mic or there was a mic up there too. Nifty stuff for the time.

My junior-high was built in the 1870s, and it had a lot of cool old woodwork, and they tried to integrate the speakers into the flow of the woodwork. Matching boxes, matching stain, kinda cool. They just tore that one down a couple years ago. I never got to see the console there.

High school, I couldn't tell you what we had. I was too busy looking at other stuff, lol.

I think most of us were doing the same thing.LOL...Again I cant recall what system my high school had at the time.They probably started with tube unit in the 1960's when it was built.Later on when I was there they probably updated to solid state by then which I was there in 1981.

[Jon A.]

Originally Posted by centralradio

I think most of us were doing the same thing.LOL...Again I cant recall what system my high school had at the time.They probably started with tube unit in the 1960's when it was built.Later on when I was there they probably updated to solid state by then which I was there in 1981.

Me too, but my social life was practically non-existent so it all balanced out. Little wonder I got the "Most unique personality" title in my senior year.

There's one thing I didn't think of mentioning, the intercom at my high school also was a two-way unit with no visible microphone.

On a side note, confusion about whether stairwell doors were to be pushed or pulled was a running joke there. Those wood frame doors with large, single panes of wire-reinforced glass and identical handles on both sides were pop quizzes in themselves.

[nasadowsk]

My elementary had a 60's vintage (solid state!) setup. When someone called the office, you'd get a beautiful *ding* bell in there, and the particular channel would light up. I want to say the amps were Webster. The radio was a Sherwood tuner - tube. The thing had bad amps - no balls at all, and 1/2 the school couldn't hear announcements.

The light board was no better - ancient (40s?) Kliegl. Dimmer 3 sparked between 70 and 80 percent, dimmer 4 was disconnected (handle flopped), dimmer 6 was bypassed (handle connected, but did nothing - full power all the time). I once brought up a 3rd border (blue #3, IIRC), heard a loud hum behind me and saw sparks coming from the back stage.

Amazingly, the school's still standing. The other end of the block was the fire dept. Speaking of which, the smoke detectors worked - and were the really really old radium type ionizations. Pyr-A-Larm. They didn't talk much about that at parent's night, this being the post TMI era and Shoreham being under construction 30 miles east.

In High School, I learned about Federal-Pacific breakers when the Kiln shorted out and the FP Stab-Lok didn't trip. Nice spring day, no classes from noon onward...

[Electronic M]

I've attended about 4 different educational facilities. The first two I simply don't remember well enough.

High School (the short bit I did before shifting back to home school) they had the bell over the intercom, and would play ~30sec-1min of Europe's "The Final Countdown" before playing the bell...The place was a sprawling 1 story maze of a building. I could probably walk over 1 mile without taking the same section of hall twice (ignoring intersections)....When that song came on, if you were not within 1 'hall block' of your class it equaled a starting gun for a X meter dash. Parts of that building were 50's era, but the electronics were all modern (probably from the last addition). There was cable and a student news channel that some teachers played when it came on...Most of the time it was poorly run...One particularly bad example was one news cast someone must have been blowing on the mike of something since there was this unbearable rumble in the audio that drowned out ~%90 of what they were saying...I got my whole writing class + teacher to bust out laughing at the end of that news program by saying in an announcer type voice "The audio for today's news cast brought to you by Thor the Viking God of thunder. kaboom!" .

Last institution I studied in was MSOE (BSEE 2015) they had a mix of old buildings they had been using since the beginning, old buildings they bought and renovated, and stuff that had been built not long ago. The new buildings had new stuff, some of the renovated buildings had a mix of original and new, and the old mostly had old.
The campus (Krampus?) center is a good example of a mix. The Todd Wehr (spelling?) auditorium and pub look to have all their original fixtures from the ~40's, but the big lounge area was last remodeled in ~the mid 80's (though they left the old horn speakers in the rafters), and the new nursing wing of that building is all brand new.
The science building is probably the most original/kooky It looks to have been built in the 40's and I've been told an adjacent parking garage was enclosed and made into more class rooms....Given the architecture and trim in that area I'd say it was done in the 60's...The older part of that has DuKane speakers on the walls, and the whole place has Simplex clocks that seem to tick in ~1-5 minute intervals....They mostly still work, but some are dead and or have been supplanted by newer battery clocks....There is one in a 2nd floor hall (it juts out in a pod and has 2 faces) with no hands on one face....For a long time I had half a mind to stick a note reading ("Does anybody really know what time it is, does anybody really care?" <- Chicago) on the face without hands. Another place that was really impressive was the IIRC Alumni partnership building: A Victorian mansion of the owner of one of the local beer Companies. That place appears to be very original, well preserved and fancy.

Never seen the control console anyplace I went to school. (Though I've seen some interested maintenance rooms in MSOE).

[Ed in Tx]

I remember late '50s-'60s an old tube-type Dukane console unit, and the school rooms had a speaker in the middle of the ceiling each with a Lowell brushed aluminum baffle with the diffusion cone on the bottom.