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Panic Around Pagers: Old and New
Thirty years ago, parents worried bad people would place beepers on their kids. The risks have mutated.
Pagers were used today, September 17, 2024, as weapons of war in Lebanon and Syria when hundreds of devices exploded simultaneously on Hezbollah members.
This event reminds me of a story about pagers from three decades ago. I’m not a security expert. Today, I’m just a storyteller.
Adults Wore Beepers, and They Caught On With Kids
In the 1980s, car phones (early mobile phones) were large and expensive and didn’t widely catch on.
Pagers, sometimes called “beepers,” were more portable. All these devices did was beep. But that was something.
Adults used them for work. When an employee heard the beep, they knew the boss wanted them.
Teenagers were rumored to use beepers to communicate with drug dealers. Police in the 1980s believed this. Therefore, as Jocelyn Stewart wrote for the Los Angeles Times:
many school districts banned the devices from campuses in the mid- to late 1980s. In 1988, the California State Educational Code was amended to prohibit all “electronic signaling devices.”
Nonetheless, by 1991, when Stewart was writing, it had become typical for teenagers in Southern California to wear beepers. It was their parents who wanted to keep track of them, and the kids felt it was fashionable.
The Amy Fisher Case
On May 19, 1992, Amy Fisher, a 17-year-old high school student on Long Island, New York, rang the bell at the home of 37-year-old Mary Jo Buttafuoco.
Buttafuoco stepped onto her front porch and had a brief conversation with the girl, whom she had never met before. Fisher shot her in the face and fled the scene.
