The Town of Okotoks bid farewell to its last payphone on Thursday.

Representatives from Telus and the Town of Okotoks held a ceremony to say goodbye to the phone, which stood near the Okotoks post office.

It was quite a sendoff, with the refreshments table featuring a cake replica of the phone from 94 Take the Cake.

Okotoks got its first payphone in 1963, and the phones were pretty well used for nearly 60 years.

With cellphones becoming more and more relied upon, the need for payphones gradually vanished, and now they truly are a thing of the past.

Mayor Tanya Thorn recalled a time not too long ago when they were essential.

"I do remember leaving my house and my mom always saying 'don't forget a dime,' so I always had dimes in my shoes because that was the way we called home... The rule in our family was that if I was going to transition between place A and place B, there had to be a phone call, so you always had to have a dime. I grew up in small-town Alberta, so those payphones were how we stayed connected."

The McRae street phone's usage peaked in 2000, with 138,328 calls.

In 2021, there were just two calls, and this year, there were none.

The phone will live on, however.

It was auctioned off by The Eagle 100.9, with the winner able to hook it up to a cellphone or landline.

Julie Dufresne ended up taking it home.

Her young children were singing Maroon 5's Payphone all week to convince her to place bids, and they were thrilled to be the new owners of the now-antiquated piece of technology.

"We have a couple of ideas," says Dufresne. "We might use it for my 17-year-old son, he wants a cellphone so we thought this is perfect, he can pay per call, or I might set it up as a business phone for our home business and just put it on the wall and get business calls to come through it for fun."

Her winning bid of $525 will go to the Sheep River Health Trust.

Telus also made a $5000 donation to the Health Trust, with donations being made in each town that's having to say goodbye to its last payphone.