Joybubbles ( – ), born Josef Carl Engressia Jr. in Richmond, Virginia, was an early phone phreak. Born blind, he became interested in telephones at age four. He had absolute pitch, and was able to whistle 2600 hertz into a telephone, an operator tone also used by blue box phreaking devices. Joybubbles said that he had an IQ of "172 or something". Joybubbles died at his Minneapolis home on . According to his death certificate, he died of natural causes with congestive heart failure as a contributing condition. Whistler As a five-year-old, Engressia discovered he could dial phone numbers by clicking the hang-up switch rapidly ("tapping"), and at the age of 7 he accidentally discovered that whistling at certain frequencies could activate phone switches. A student at the University of South Florida in the late 1960s, he was given the nickname "Whistler" due to his ability to place free long-distance phone calls by whistling the proper tones with his mouth. After a Canadian operator reported him for selling such calls for $1 at the university, he was suspended and fined $25 but soon reinstated. He later graduated with a degree in philosophy and moved to Tennessee. Later life In 1982, he moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota. He lived on his Social Security disability pension and a job as a test subject for scent-intensity research. He was an ordained minister of his own Church of Eternal Childhood, and ran a one-man nonprofit support organization for people rediscovering and re-experiencing childhood, called "We Won't Grow Up". He tried to remain an active member of the children's community around his home, giving readings at the local library and setting up phone calls to terminally ill children around the world. He often contributed to the Bulletin Board section of the St. Paul Pioneer Press newspaper. Sexually abused as a child by one of his teachers, Joybubbles "reverted to his childhood" in May 1988 and remained there until his death, claiming that he was five years old. He legally changed his name to Joybubbles in 1991, stating that he wanted to put his past, specifically the abuse, behind him. He was listed in the local phone directory as "Joybubbles, I Am". An avid fan of Mister Rogers, Joybubbles was mentioned in a November 1998 Esquire magazine article about children's television host Fred Rogers. In the summer of 1998, Joybubbles traveled to the University of Pittsburgh's Mister