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Dorothy Hawkinson of Sacramento won't give up her classic rotary phone that she bought from a Pacific Bell store more than 25 years ago. She's also part of another rare group these days: people without a cell phone. Hawkinson said she dislikes the sound quality of cell phones and hard-to-read numbers.

Millions of cost-cutting Americans are asking: Ditch the landline phone and go completely wireless, or keep paying two bills for dependability and peace of mind? Many have already clipped the cord.

Wireless-only households have surpassed those solely dependent on landlines, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which tracks the information.

Still, some won't give up on their landline with its comforting dial tone whether out of laziness, concerns about safety, sound quality, the cost of cell phones, or simply – tradition.

"It's a fixture in the house, kind of like the refrigerator," said technology analyst Larry Magid. "It's just there, it's reliable, it's wired and glued in place because of the cord, and there's no meter on it."

There were 270 million cell phones in use in December 2008, the most recent figure available from the trade group CTIA-The Wireless Association. That figure's up from 110 million in 2000, and it means 87 percent of Americans have a phone they take everywhere, the group found.

More than 20 percent of households were wireless-only in December, and another 15 percent said they took most calls on cell phones instead of landlines, according to the CDC's National Center for Health Statistics. Just 17 percent of households had a landline without a cell phone.

"I have both a landline and a cell phone and every time I pay that landline bill I wonder why," said Stephen Blumberg, senior scientist at the National Center for Health Statistics.

Blumberg fell into tracking phone use in 2003, when the CDC realized that people giving up landlines could cause potential bias in the center's health surveys, which are taken over the phone. The studies have found that home ownership, not age, is the biggest predictor of a wireless home – renters are four times less likely to have a landline, Blumberg said.

There were also health differences between those with and without landlines. Wireless-only adults are more likely to smoke, binge drink, be without health insurance and not wear a seat belt, according to Blumberg.

The CDC doesn't know why this is, but collects the information to mitigate distortion in surveys.

"It may be as simple as persons who are wireless-only are more likely to be out with friends, socializing outside the home," Blumberg said.

Dorothy Hawkinson, 57, of Sacramento, doesn't have a cell phone and likes it that way. The retired nonprofit fundraiser and fiddle player finds the sound quality of cell phones to be problematic and hates that she needs her reading glasses to see the numbers.

Hawkinson has three phones in her house, a cordless, an office phone and a classic ivory rotary phone with a gold cradle she bought for about $200 from a Pacific Bell store more than 25 years ago.

And when the phone rings, she picks it up, even though she doesn't have caller ID.

"That's the way it's been my whole life so I don't think about it," she said.

Laura Cerda, 41, of Sacramento, canceled her landline but reordered it two months later. Cerda's mom comes over one night a week to watch her daughter but never bothers to turn on her cell phone. So the only way Cerda could reach her was to call the house phone.

Cerda's daughter doesn't bother answering her cell phone, either.

"Much to my dismay, we have to text, and I can't really yell effectively through a text," said the commercial real estate manager.

Wireless and telecom industry analyst Jeff Kagan doesn't see the landline phone dying completely, just a transformation of the industry. Everything is becoming connected, he said, so that one day a person will be able to talk on a cell phone that will transfer seamlessly to a home phone when the user walks through the door, and even connect to the Internet and TV. There are already Internet-based phone calls with Skype and Vonage.

"We're moving in that direction in the next 10 to 20 years," Kagan said.

Businesses are letting go of landlines at a much slower pace than private phone customers, ensuring the job security of Jose Olagues, a telecom analyst for California State University, Sacramento.

Landlines are generally cheaper than cell phones, Olagues said. And businesses need the dependability of phones that don't cut out or run out of battery life.

Still, the 35-year-old Olagues ditched his landline at home when AT&T started offering DSL broadband without a phone number last year.

"I don't think we had a phone plugged in for a year anyway," Olagues said. "All we got was telemarketers."

There is something lost when people turn wireless, said Kevin Wehr, associate professor of sociology at Sac State. Area codes no longer matter, people lose the safety of an electricity-free phone, and there is longing for the simpler times of the past – the ring tone on Wehr's iPhone is the old-style telephone ring.

"It punches some nostalgia buttons," he said. "It sounds interesting and old school."

Magid, the technology analyst, also feels nostalgia for his landline, and swears he'll never get rid of it. He harkens back to the days before cell phones, when he never knew who was going to answer the house phone.

"It's the communal phone; when you called home, my dad might answer, my mom might answer, my sister might answer," he said. "I was calling the family, not the individual."

Magid also likes the comfort of knowing he'll always be able to call 911, and that the last dropped call he had on his landline was in 1989, during the Loma Prieta earthquake.

Dan Weiser, Web editor for the U.S. House of Representatives and former KCRA news director, canceled his landline this week. The unintended consequence is that the 51-year-old can no longer call his cell phone to figure out where he misplaced it.

A Canadian solar power company has purchased OptiSolar's now-shuttered manufacturing operations at McClellan Park, reviving hopes that the factory can be a green-tech anchor for the region.

Mike Matvieshen, president and CEO of EPOD Solar, said Thursday that an assembly line at McClellan is likely to restart in September.

Matvieshen said it's not clear how many jobs at the site will be restored. In addition, he said, EPOD has not determined when or if it will follow through with expansions originally planned by OptiSolar.

"It really depends on what happens in the market," he said.

EPOD is based in British Columbia but is relocating to Hayward. The company announced earlier this week that it would buy OptiSolar's Hayward and McClellan operations for $260 million in stock.

The Hayward plant has the capacity to produce 30 megawatts of solar cells annually. A robotic line at McClellan assembles the cells into panels for installation. The robotic process is meant to deliver panels at a particularly low cost.

OptiSolar had planned to install a huge amount of additional solar-cell manufacturing capacity at McClellan to supply a planned 550-megawatt solar farm – bigger than any yet built – in San Luis Obispo County, as well as other projects. The factory would eventually have employed as many as 1,000 people. Sacramento County offered a $20 million package of long-term tax incentives to lure the company, and its arrival in 2008 was an economic development coup for the region.

But OptiSolar quickly ran out of money after the economy soured last fall, and the solar-cell lines at McClellan were never built. Mass layoffs started in January, and in March the company sold off its business operations to First Solar, a major manufacturer based in Arizona.

EPOD's plans are more modest than OptiSolar's.

The company has a small plant in Wales and is planning to build a 30-megawatt factory in Germany. It has a project pipeline totaling 117 megawatts – all outside the United States – that it hopes to develop over the next three years. That means it won't need additional capacity at McClellan unless it brings in substantial new business.

EPOD builds and operates "solar parks" and sells the electricity they produce. The company was founded in 2002, and now runs a handful of parks – mainly in Germany – with a combined power capacity of 1.5 megawatts. It has announced deals to build two additional parks totaling 7 megawatts in Ontario, Canada.

Financing large solar developments of the type EPOD hopes to build has been difficult since the credit crunch hit last fall. Globally, solar panel shipments will drop more than 30 percent this year, according to a forecast by Navigant Consulting.

EPOD plans to reopen a $300 million loan guarantee application that OptiSolar submitted to the U.S. Department of Energy in February. It is also hoping for help from a new federal program meant to boost exports of renewable energy equipment, Matvieshen said.

OptiSolar listed roughly 700,000 square feet of its McClellan space with a broker earlier this month. Matvieshen said EPOD would likely continue to seek a new tenant for at least some of the space. McClellan officials and the real estate broker both declined to comment.

Rob Leonard, Sacramento County's economic development director, was pleased to learn of the deal Thursday.

"It's good for McClellan and good for the region," he said.

EPOD has been privately held but is in the process of going public by merging into Allora Minerals Inc., a shell company listed on the Over-The-Counter Bulletin Board. The public company will be called EPOD Solar Inc.

Association of College Unions International Collegiate 9-Ball Championships / Normal, IL by Lea Andrews After three days of intense play in the Association of College Unions International Collegiate 9-Ball Championships presented by Ozone Billiards, one male and one female student have become 2009 Champions. Adam Maloney of Texas A & M University and Shari Cui of [...]

Association of College Unions International Collegiate 9-Ball Championships / Normal, IL by InsidePOOL Staff Lars Vardaman is sitting pretty in the hot seat after day two of competition in the ACUI Collegiate 9-Ball Championships at Illinois State University in Normal, IL. Vardaman returns for his final year of eligibility, attempting to be the first man in [...]

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