Childhood … for Grownups

Chuck & Buck, a somewhat underrated 2000 film that was one of the first major releases shot on digital video, revolves around Buck, a 27-year-old man (Mike White) who, for all intents and purposes, is an 11-year-old boy. He perpetually sucks on Blow Pops, fills his room with toys, wears ill-fitting windbreakers, and speaks to other adults in a simplistic, gee-whiz monotone. The story begins with the death of Buck’s mother, a tragedy that sends him in pursuit of a childhood friend, an LA music producer named Chuck (Chris Weitz), with a stalker’s determination. Buck is clearly not developmentally challenged; he simply seems to be stuck in a time warp set to the years he and Chuck played make believe. A ridiculous tale? Perhaps. Yet, while Buck may seem an implausible character, there are, in fact, adults in real life — fully functioning members of society who are well educated and can live independently — who pursue the articles, activities, and attitudes of childhood with more dedication than most actual tykes.

One case study of this, a prominent Minnesotan who, sadly, died last August, would rightly be called the ultimate pursuer of this strange approach to life. For starters, his name was Joybubbles. He loved stories and had imaginary friends. And he was an avid fan of Mister Rogers and similar shows, as well as an incessant collector of toys, dolls, and other playthings, listing his age as "five" until the day he died, at 58. All this despite the fact that he was once a graduate student in philosophy with an IQ of 172, who could imitate the analog dial tone that used to be a fixture of the phone system. It was this last talent that briefly brought him international fame as the grandfather of a short-lived movement known as phone phreaking.

Blind since birth, Joybubbles entered this world as Josef Engressia in 1949, in Richmond, Virginia. In 1991, he legally changed his name to Joybubbles, which he happened upon several years earlier at a motivational seminar in Minneapolis. The leader of the conference asked attendees to describe themselves in one word. The first thing that came out of Engrassia’s head was "Joybubbles!" This confabulation gave the participant so much reason for living, he applied it to all unofficial and official documents, including his social security card.

The reason behind this alias, and Joybubbles’ fixation on collecting Raggedy Ann dolls, Curious George books, and Sesame Street episodes, was borne out of a desire to recapture the childhood he felt he never had, and to escape the adult world he no longer wished to be a part of. "Childhood is a protected status," says Ross MacDonald, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota, "No one really expects anything of you. It’s a time of fun and frivolity, at least in theory. Someone uninterested in the pressures and responsibilities of adult life, and there is no natural reason to want them, would likely find childhood a fairly palatable state."

A quite unpalatable past drove Joybubbles’ infatuation: the sexual abuse he suffered when he was actually a child. According to longtime friend and executor of his estate, Steven Gibb, young Josef’s mother refused to believe her son’s reports about the molestation he experienced at the hands of a nun, who was also one of his grade school teachers. Consequently, as the years went by, mother and son would become so estranged that they ceased direct communication, using his father and later, following his death, his equally blind sister as go-betweens for messages.

Another source of the friction between child and parent, and a driving force in Joybubbles’ need to make up for lost kid time, was the isolation that he felt from other children, thanks to his ability to read at an advanced level and enjoy cultural pursuits far above his age group. The latter, above all, included phone phreaking, which involved duplicating the tones that connected long-distance numbers, thus allowing the phreak (a hybrid of the words "phone" and "freak") to make long-distance calls without the phone company making a record and charging the caller.

This bizarre hobby was made possible when human switchboard operators were replaced by automated systems that relied on tones. From the late ‘40s through the mid-‘70s, the telephone network relied upon a 2600 Hertz, or Hz, tone to indicate when a long-distance trunk line was idle, and used pulses of 2600 Hz to send dialing information. Most phone phreaks needed mechanical whistles to duplicate this sound (this included one acclaimed individual called Captain Crunch, so named after the cereal, whose whistle prize he used to imitate the tone), but Joybubbles, who was born with perfect pitch, could do so simply with his mouth.

It’s not hard to see the members of this niche movement as antecedents of today’s computer hackers. In fact, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the founders of Apple, started out as participants in this game. Phil Lapsley, an Oakland, California author who is currently working on a book about phone phreaks, claims: "Phone phreaking and hacking started to intertwine in the 1970s as computers became more widespread. Many of the skills that made one a good phone phreak also made one a good hacker. If you can understand how the telephone system works, you can probably understand how computers work, too."

As it happens, Joybubbles was one phreak who did not join the computer revolution, in no small part because he was blind. Even when Jaws and other audio systems enabled the visually impaired to use the technology in as sophisticated a manner as sighted people, and e-mail accounts could be had via telephone, Joybubbles, following a brief dalliance with the internet in the late ‘90s, never developed an interest in it. But, in the era of phreaking, he amassed an impressive "rap sheet" — ever since the day in 1957 when the eight-year-old Josef Engressia discovered that whistling the fourth E above middle C would stop a dialed phone recording. This went on until the end of the ‘60s, when, as a graduate student in Tennessee, he was given a suspended sentence for malicious mischief after making long-distance calls for friends at a dollar a minute.

Engressia became such a celebrated member of this cult that an NBC Nightly News report featured him on November 27, 1968 — a clip of which can be found on YouTube and which is likely the only visual documentation of his life available to the public. He was also the inspiration for the blind character of Whistler, played by David Strathairn in the 1992 movie Sneakers.


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