AT&T'S GOLDEN BOY LOOKS BACK

Golden Boy, which is officially known as The Spirit of Communications, has undergone its share of Article 16 transfers and anatomy adjustments during his 91 years with AT&T. The 24-foot bronze statue, which is covered in more than 40,000 pieces of gold leaf, has had quite a journey to his spot in front of the company's headquarters.

Golden Boy, the statue commissioned in 1914 by Bell System founder Theodore Vail, is the symbol of a company that doesn't exist. We asked him to look back on his long career.

195 Broadway, New York City, 1916-80

My mother is Evelyn Beatrice Longman who sculpted me in 1916. I was then hoisted 465 feet above street level to the top of AT&T's headquarters on Broadway in New York. And that's where I stood for 65 years. I had killer views during my glory days in downtown Manhattan and even made the cover of the phone book. I was a symbol of the power of America's telephone monopoly.

555 Madison Avenue, New York, 1983-92

My new home, post-breakup. Looks cushy, right? Think again. Not only was I gilded, I was gelded. They finally realized I was not just a boy. (AT&T feared offending mid-town shoppers. Did Michelangelo's "David" have to put up with that?) It was a symbol of what was to come. We bade farewell to the Baby Bells in 1984 and marched into computers, trumpeting Unix, our operating system. That flopped, so we bought NCR. We lost billions, laid off thousands, and wrote off our phone network. And we missed what could have saved us: the Internet.

Basking Ridge, N.J., 1992-2002

After we abandoned the Madison Avenue digs to those upstarts from Sony, I moved to the 'burbs. More space! Fresh air! But things only got worse. In 1996 we shed NCR, Lucent, and 70% of Bell Labs, our legendary research operation. More thousands of employees are laid off.

Bedminster, N.J., 2002 until today

Another decade, another office park. We deployed a risky strategy to spend $110 billion on cable companies. It drove us into the ground. We dumped everything but long distance, and then watched brutal price wars destroy the business. Maybe SBC will move me out of the parking lot--if it doesn't lay me off.