I have reached Dr. Chad Brickhouse by phone 1,312 times over 19 years. I know the number because he keeps a log, and he reads it to me at the start of each call, which adds about four minutes.
In all that time, I have never reached him anywhere but by phone, and he has never been anywhere but somewhere loud. I have reached him at car washes, at hardware stores, at youth hockey rinks, at a bowling alley, and once, memorably, at what he described as “the loud part of the airport.” I have never met him in person. Neither, as far as I can establish, has anyone at the Institute for Common Sense, where he has been a senior fellow since 2007 and where his office is, according to the building directory, a telephone.
Last week, while reporting on the Continental Census Bureau’s count of the nation’s flag shirts, I called him from a rental car on the shoulder of a state highway. He answered on the first ring and said, “Hang on, I’m in a phone.”
Journalists are trained to ask what people mean, so I asked him what he meant. He meant that he was in a phone. He was speaking to me, he explained, from inside a second phone call, which he had been on when I called and which he had not left. “Which phone?” I asked. “A different one,” he said.
I could hear it behind him, faintly: the other call. I could make out a car wash. I could make out a man asking Dr. Brickhouse what he meant. After a moment I recognized the man’s voice as my own, from a call I had placed to him the previous Tuesday, about something else. “You’re still on that one?” I asked. “I’m on all of them,” he said. “That’s how you stay reachable. It’s just common sense.”
I asked him to step out of the phone so that we could speak more clearly. He said he couldn’t, and offered instead to transfer me to the outer phone, where he said the reception was better. The transfer took 40 minutes. When it went through, he was at a car wash inside it, and he said, “Hang on, I’m in a phone.”
I have thought a great deal since then about what it means to cultivate a source. Young reporters ask me how it’s done. They want a trick. There is no trick. You call him. Then you call him again. You keep calling him, from gates and rental cars and the shoulders of highways, for 19 years, until he picks up on the first ring every time, and eventually, if you call long enough, you will not be sure which one of you is the phone.
People sometimes ask whether I worry that I have never seen Dr. Brickhouse. I don’t. I have seen plenty of people, and none of them would return my calls the way he does. A source you can see is a source who can walk away. A source you can only reach by phone is a source who is always, in some sense, reachable, which is more than I can say for most of the people I’ve met in person, or for my editor, who has asked me to stop including this paragraph.
I am writing this at Gate B14. A few minutes ago, the gate agent paged me to the desk. When I got there, she handed me a phone. It was Dr. Brickhouse. He said, “It’s just common sense,” and hung up.
I’ve been sitting here for an hour trying to work out what he was confirming. I’ll call him about it. He’ll pick up.