The winding, telephonic odyssey of Joybubbles, the original phone phreak
Originally published in The Kernel, December 6, 2015.
When Joybubbles died in 2007, his New York Times obituary called him the “Peter Pan of phone hackers.” And that phrase neatly summed up his life: Born Joe Engressia Jr., through his restless and relentless exploration he’d become a seminal figure in the early culture of what came to be known as “phone phreaking.” Blind from birth, at an early age he’d learned that just by whistling he could make ordinary telephones obey him. That was in the 1950s; he may have been the first person to whistle his way down the labyrinthine passages of that proto-Internet, the global telephone system.
He whistled his way into a kind of minor infamy; when his telephonic wizardry caught the authorities’ attention, first came the legal threats, then the media coverage, including Associated Press reports and a profile in Esquire. Already respected by fellow phreakers, he became the go-to for would-bes and wannabes as well. And he was a good first contact because he never kept any secrets. He even turned his phreaking into a career, working for a small telephone company — at least for a little while.
In broad outline, that’s the “phone hacker” part of his story. But there’s that “Peter Pan” part, too: how Joe Engressia decided that he’d never…
