LAURIE KELLMAN AND SARAH PARVINI
The small plastic box that beeped and flashed numbers was a lifeline to Laurie Dove in 1993. Pregnant with her first baby in a house beyond any town in rural Kansas, Dove used the little black device to keep in touch with her husband as he delivered medical supplies. He carried one, too. They had a code.
“If I really needed something I would text ‘9-1-1.’ That meant anything from, ‘I’m going to labor right now’ to ‘I really need to get ahold of you,’” she recalls. “It was our version of texting. I was as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rockers. It was important.”
Beepers and all they symbolized — connection to each other or, in the 1980s, to drugs — went the way of answering machines decades ago when smartphones wiped them from popular culture. They resurfaced in tragic form Tuesday when thousands of pagers exploded simultaneously in Lebanon, killing at least a dozen people and injuring thousands in a mysterious, multiday attack as Israel declared a new phase of its war on Hezbollah.
In many photos, blood marks the spot where pagers tend to be clipped — to a belt, in a pocket, near a hand — in graphic reminders of just how intimately people still hold those devices and the links — or vulnerability — they enable.
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