Cellular One: The Impossibile Dream

Thirty-six years ago today, the nation’s first Cellular One got its commercial license from the FCC and opened for business. The branding had not yet been developed, but we needed some souvenir swag for the grand opening party in February of 1984, so Wayne Schelle had some commemorative coffee mugs printed up.

Wayne was a big fan of Man of La Mancha and thought that Don Quixote’s ambitious quest was a perfect metaphor for a regional paging company’s audacious efforts to go toe-to-toe with The Bell System in cellular. Our rallying cry for months had been, “Our impossible dream.” Wayne had an early mix tape that played constantly on our frequent trips from Baltimore to the lawyers’ offices in DC; we dreamed the impossible dream and fought the unbeatable foe hundreds of times on those car rides. That and the theme from “Chariots of Fire.”

The souvenir mugs, several hundred of them, came in a few days before the party. With a typo. “Impossible” was misspelled as “impossibile.” The vendor got corrected replacements delivered a few hours before the reception and no one was the wiser.

But I had grabbed one of the typo mugs, and so had my colleague at ARTS, Kathryn Condello. Sixteen years later, Kathryn and I were again working together at CTIA, and Wireless Week (or RCR; I forget, sorry) heard the story of the typo mugs and did a little feature on it in 2000.