Southwestern Bell Corporation (Now AT&T;) - Delaware

Beautifully engraved RARE specimen certificate from Southwestern Bell Corporation. This historic document was printed by American Bank Note Company and has an ornate border around it with a vignette of a allegorical man and woman sitting in front of a city skyline. This item has the signatures of the Company's Chairman, Zane Barnes and Transfer Agent.


Certificate Vignette

After the AT&T; breakup in 1984, Southwestern Bell Telephone Company was managed by Southwestern Bell Corporation, which was ironically the smallest of all of the 7 RBOCs, as it only held 1 telephone company. Both the holding company, SBC, and SWBT often were referred to as one "Southwestern Bell". In 1995, however, SBC decided to change its corporate name to SBC Communications, Inc., a decision made to make itself a national telecommunications company. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 enabled SBC to become a national company, and SBC acquired the Pacific Telesis Group in 1997; Southern New England Telecommunications in 1998, and Ameritech in 1999.

Zane Barnes - In 1973, Barnes moved to St. Louis to become president of Southwestern Bell Telephone Co., and within a year he was named chief executive officer. He became president and chief executive officer of Southwestern Bell Corp.(later became SBC Communications Inc. and AT&T;) in 1983 and retired in 1989.

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About Specimens

Specimen Certificates are actual certificates that have never been issued. They were usually kept by the printers in their permanent archives as their only example of a particular certificate. Sometimes you will see a hand stamp on the certificate that says "Do not remove from file".

Specimens were also used to show prospective clients different types of certificate designs that were available. Specimen certificates are usually much scarcer than issued certificates. In fact, many times they are the only way to get a certificate for a particular company because the issued certificates were redeemed and destroyed. In a few instances, Specimen certificates we made for a company but were never used because a different design was chosen by the company.

These certificates are normally stamped "Specimen" or they have small holes spelling the word specimen. Most of the time they don't have a serial number, or they have a serial number of 00000. This is an exciting sector of the hobby that grown in popularity over the past several years.