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Phone Booth Packing
Phone Booth Packing was a 1950's fad in which a bunch of people crammed themselves into a telephone booth. It became all the rage with college students in 1959. It even rose to a competitive level, pitting college against college. Due to the competitive edge, the question arose whether packing into a phone booth meant the whole body, half a body or just a part of a body. This question arose when a South African college said it had been able to fit twenty-five students into a booth made for one, setting a "world record" that has never been defeated. Before coming to North America, a group of London University students packed into one of the wide-body booths that were present in England. Some tried using extra-large fraternity hall phone booths, and a group of Canadian students was able to jam forty students into one. However, this was considered cheating. From then on, only standard American sized booths were used to pack people in. At one particular junior college in Modesto, California, phone booth packing was so popular that a phone booth was donated by a phone company to use for the so called sport. The students succeeded in going thirty-four people high before tipping the phone booth on its side. Unfortunately, their record was argued as invalid because the booth had been tipped. This yet led to another rule that the phone booth had to be upright. One of the most famous episodes of phone booth packing happened in April of 1959 when seven young men from Fresno College crammed into a phone booth submerged in a swimming pool.
There were many styles of ‘cramming’, one of which was sandwich-style, which happened to be the first style. This style of cramming was invented by Ryerson Tech students in Toronto, but it was soon disregarded because the students had protruding legs coming from the booth. On the other hand, the students from MIT took a "scientific" approach, and were able to seat nineteen carefully and comfortably in a fraternity phone cubicle that was much larger than the regularly used type of booth. This fad began to expire when cramming of a different kind was introduced.