Tim Miller has no use for the cell towers atop The Oread Inn. He says he’s in constant communication through e-mail and his phones at home and work. He has no use for a cell phone, though his wife bought him a pre-paid phone for when he travels (not that he turns it on).

Sometimes, Tim Miller just doesn’t want to be found.

Sometimes, husband and wife Roger Martin and Barbara Yoder just want peace and quiet.

And sometimes, Bob Thurber will go an entire month without hearing a dial tone.

All reasons why the Lawrence residents don’t have cell phones. Yes, swimming against the heavy tide of convention, these folks don’t have them, don’t want them, don’t need them. OK, well, sometimes they admit they need them, but not as often as you might think.

The reasons vary about as much as the possible service providers they are snubbing. They range from wanting quiet, to feeling too connected, to labeling it an unnecessary expense, to just plain not needing one.

“Why does anyone want a cell phone? My life is full of communication, I get 50 to 100 e-mails every day. I have a phone at home and a phone at work. I don’t need more contact, I’ve got plenty,” says Miller, 65. “I listen to people walking down Jayhawk Boulevard talking on their phones and the conversation is usually about at the level of, ‘Oh, not much, what are you doing?’ I need to pay $100 a month for that?”

Of course, in some situations the cost and all the other cons can be outweighed by the convenience of being able to make a call from anywhere. Yoder, 52, a teacher at the Applied English Center at Kansas University, recalls being in a tight spot where she really wished she at least shared a phone with her husband, Martin, 63.

“I found myself in this situation where I was in charge of 12 Japanese students and we were waiting in 6 degrees at a bus stop, and it turned out to be the wrong bus stop and I really needed to have a cell phone in that case to do my job,” Yoder says. “One of the kids, fortunately, pulled out a cell phone and we were able to figure out we were at the wrong bus stop and remedy that. And, after that, I thought, ‘Man, maybe it’s time to rethink this.’ But, primarily, we don’t want any more complications than we already have in our lives.”

The need to have it while traveling has crossed Miller’s mind, and his wife, Tamara Dutton, even took it upon herself to buy him a pay-as-you-go cell phone for his trips around the state for research and other duties as a professor of religion at KU. But if he has it with him, it’s not on, nor will he call you from it barring a major car wreck or some other disaster.

And then there’s Thurber, who is just plain bothered by the whole idea of phones in general — he says he’s gone weeks without picking up his home phone or answering any except the most urgent of messages from family and friends. He’s so annoyed by the concept of a cell phone that when he passes drivers yakking away while on the highway, he has a special way of letting them know how he feels about their yammering.

“I have to say, I get pretty irritated, like a lot of people do, I’m sure, when someone is on a cell phone and driving and not paying attention,” Thurber says. “As a joke, I’ve got an old, mustard yellow rotary phone that I’ve put on my dash, just to show people that’s my mobile phone. And if I get really irritated … I’ll pick up my receiver and shake it at somebody, but it hasn’t really happened very often.”

And lest you think the trend is just for folks who have lived most of their lives before the cellular age, meet Ashley Howard. At 25, Howard doesn’t have a cell phone, despite the fact that she has family out of state and many other people her age use their phones for constant Twitter and Facebook updates.

“I can afford to have one, I just chose not to. I had one, my contract ended in October, and I thought, ‘I don’t really use it that often,’ so I just gave it up,” says Howard, a receptionist who admits her day job might be a latent reason for getting rid of her cell phone. “It was kind of a needless bill. I mean, I have a house phone and my fiancé has a cell phone. I have long distance on my house phone — I have a lot of family out of state — and so I’ll often use that.”

Amanda Ostmeyer, a sales representative at Verizon Wireless at 2301 S. Iowa, says she sees at least one adult customer a week who has never had a cell phone. But more often than that, she sees parents buying phones for another subset who never before had cell phones: children.

“We have more and more children, around the age of 9 or younger, getting cell phones now. I’ve even seen people buy cell phones for an infant, just to have the phone in the diaper bag for the nanny,” Ostmeyer says. “It’s reaching the point where I almost think cell phones are going to be required.”

Thurber is pleased to be old enough to have made it through childhood and most of adulthood without constantly being that connected. Now, if only he can make it to his dying breath without knowing how to operate a BlackBerry.

“I joke around with my friends, I tell them that that’s my goal: to not own a cell phone before I die,” Thurber says. “I tell them when they have my funeral, they can throw their old cell phones with a couple of minutes on them in my casket and give me a call — stand about as good of a chance of getting an answer then as you do otherwise.”