How Much Were Long Distance Calls, Say Before 1960

I’ve been watching a lot of old movies and TV and listening to some old time radio from the 40s, and when the character makes a call, (usually the wife) something delays the call and the other character (usually the husband) goes ballistic screaming, “Do you know how much this call is costing?”

My favorite is Gracie, finishing a call to her next door neighbor, asks the counter man, “How much do I owe you”? And he replies nothing since Gracie is such a good customer. So Gracie picks up the phone and calls her mother in San Francisco (she’s in LA) much to the man’s panic.

Anyone know what cost per minute a call would’ve run?

I know until recently, rates were different on the weekends, after 10pm on weekdays and so on, but if anyone remembers or has an older relative that might know, I was wondering.

Thanks.

Well, I found this:
http://www.greatachievements.org/?id=3633

The first transcontinental phone calls cost $20/3 minutes in 1915.

Technology rapidly improved performance, I don’t know about cost.

I do remember seeing phone bills back in the 60s where long-distance calls, say interstate but not transcontinental, cost a few dollars per call. One always kept them short because of cost. I was a teenager back then and don’t remember the details. I do remember Dad showing me the bills just to drive home the value of brevity!

Also, bear in mind that the minimum wage in 1960 was $1.00 and the average income was $5,000 per year.

It was enough that you played games with the phone company.

“Collect call from Bob Heresafe. Will you accept the charges?”
“Nope.”

They’re rerunning that GEICO commercial.

“Bobwehaddababyitsaboy.”

Yes, or letting it ring three times then hanging up to signal a safe arrival. There was even an All in the Family show with this as a subplot.

See table 13 (page 67):
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=14&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjwvr-suILgAhULeKwKHeT1BJUQFjANegQIARAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Ftransition.fcc.gov%2FBureaus%2FCommon_Carrier%2FReports%2FFCC-State_Link%2FIAD%2Fref97.pdf&usg=AOvVaw1x5bQcgzVwMhN6toliXxDa

These are for inter-state calls. Each state would set its own rates for intra-state long distance calls.

And don’t forget inflation since then.

When I was in college (around 1981) I got a phone bill one month where I made one (1) long distance call. At the time my basic bill was a little under $20 a month, including taxes. That one (admittedly long) call caused my bill for that month to jump to about $50.

If I remember correctly, at that time long distance within your own area code was more expensive than inter-state calls.

You don’t even have to go back to the 60’s. Long distance phone calls were really expensive even when I was growing up in the 80’s and 90’s. Some people routinely ran up phone bills that were hundreds of dollars a month especially if they needed it for family or business reasons.

There slowly became ways around it like discount calling cards but you didn’t just grab a phone and start dialing away because it might cost serious money if you didn’t know what you were doing. I called my girlfriend in Italy once while she was doing an internship and it was still about $10 a minute even though I used a calling card. I knew long-distance sweethearts in college that had to break up because the phone bills alone were way more than new car payments.

Now I just have a little Obi box connected to my router and home phone system that literally lets me call any number in the U.S. or Canada for absolutely zero. Other countries sometimes cost a fraction of a cent a minute. It is a huge improvement. Phone rentals+installation+taxes and fees+the calls themselves used to be a major expense for lots of people not that long ago.

Don’t even get me started on phone sex and psychic hotlines (1-900 numbers). A teenager could rack up one hell of a bill in no time at the low, low rate of about $5 a minute if they fell for it.

Hell, landlines were expensive for long-distance in the 2000s! When the wife and I were dating (long-distance, LA-Boston) our long distance charges were enormous. We quickly switched to a special plan, but things didn’t get cheap until after we were married.

And long distance was really only affordable after 11pm. The rates went way down (but not on weekends as I recall).

So almost all of my long-distance relationship calls from college were made on the one landline that could call outside the college. A payphone in the dark, cold lobby of my freshman dorm. And I’d shout so my high school girlfriend could hear me, sitting on the linoleum (short, metal-clad cord) with a baggie full of quarters to buy more minutes…

And then she got engaged to my best friend.

When I was in college back in the 90’s, I was working in a lab. There was another student working in the lab from Vietnam. Apparently his girlfriend/fiancee broke up with him and flew back to Vietnam. He used the lab phone to try to woo her back and in a month racked up a phone bill of several thousand dollars. I don’t know how many hours he talked for but it was expensive.

He got arrested and charged with grand theft.

They did, to varying degrees. Sundays were the lowest, IIRC.

I remember an early TV Guide joke was about putting commercials inside famous books. One was:

Call me Ishmael - after 9, or all day Sunday.

I don’t have it here to confirm, but I have a 60s national Geographic with an ad for the then-new feature of long distance direct dialing. They bragged you could call Alaska for something like $2.50 plus $1.20/minute. That’s a lot now, it must have been the province of only rich folk back then. Yet, it was being advertised as an improvement.

In the summer of 1960, I made a phone call from a Disneyland phone booth to Massachusetts. The cost was twelve quarters, about $25 today adjusted for inflation, for a three minute call. That was their Sunday or late-night rate. AT&T had three rates: day, evening(and Saturday) and night (or Sunday).

One of my American friends in Japan discovered sex chatting on AOL, back in the days. You had to be logged in America and he called from Japan. This was back in the 90s. He ran up several thousand dollars one month.

4My recollection was that AT&T advertised $3/3 min coast to coast. When I was in Japan in 1998 and my brother was dying of cancer, calls from Japan were $18/3 min. However, I discovered a special free number you could call that put you in NY and charged the NY to Princeton rate (and billed it to my home number in Montreal; significant since the only thing I had available was a pay phone.

Several of the computer industries leading lights (Steve Jobs, etc.) sold devices that made free long-distance calling possible Blue box - Wikipedia . The really advanced folks didn’t need the box John Draper - Wikipedia

When my father placed a call from our home near Philadelphia to London in about 1963, I remember it being a big deal that included many interactions with operators and long pauses to establish the connection.

yep. I was a child back then, and my family would call between England and the USA sometimes. I think you started the process by calling the international operator and asking for a reservation spot. Maybe a half hour later, she called you back and said that an opening was now available on the undersea cable. She dialed for you, calling the international operator in the other country, who called another operator who put you through to your number.
And then my parents would talk to the relatives. It must have been very expensive, because and at the end of the call, us kids would be allowed about 30 seconds to say a very quick hello.

Long Distance call prices fell after the breakup of Ma Bell in 1982, prior to which you paid whatever prices were set primarily by AT&T (which had an almost total monopoly on the telephone business). I haven’t had a lineline in decades, but I remember when you had to choose a long carrier or be subject to whatever (much higher) fee your carrier assigned to you. I also believe you couldn’t call someone directly, but had to call your long distance carrier first, then they’d route your call for you.

The next step was prepaid LD calling cards, which I believe also requires you call a special number and put in your card PIN.

*"Breakup of the Bell System

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The breakup of the Bell System was mandated on January 8, 1982, by an agreed consent decree providing that AT&T Corporation would, as had been initially proposed by AT&T, relinquish control of the Bell Operating Companies that had provided local telephone service in the United States and Canada up until that point.[1] This effectively took the monopoly that was the Bell System and split it into entirely separate companies that would continue to provide telephone service. AT&T would continue to be a provider of long distance service, while the now-independent Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs) would provide local service, and would no longer be directly supplied with equipment from AT&T subsidiary Western Electric."*

*"Effects

The breakup led to a surge of competition in the long distance telecommunications market by companies such as Sprint and MCI.[5] AT&T’s gambit in exchange for its divestiture, AT&T Computer Systems, failed, and after spinning off its manufacturing operations (most notably Western Electric, which became Lucent, then Alcatel-Lucent, now Nokia) and other misguided acquisitions such as NCR and AT&T Broadband, it was left with only its core business with roots as AT&T Long Lines and its successor AT&T Communications. It was at this point that AT&T was purchased by one of its own spin-offs, SBC Communications, the company that had also purchased two other RBOCs and a former AT&T associated operating company (Ameritech, Pacific Telesis, and SNET), and which later purchased another RBOC (BellSouth).

One consequence of the breakup was that local residential service rates, which were formerly subsidized by long distance revenues, began to rise faster than the rate of inflation. Long-distance rates, meanwhile, fell both due to the end of this subsidy and increased competition.[5]" *