When I was a child, there was no 911. If you needed police or fire, you called “0” and asked the operator for police or fire. (“It’s an emergency! My house is on fire!”) Or, you’d call the operator, and ask for “ZEnith-50000” (pronounced “zenith fifty-thousand”).
But, it was stressed, asking the operator for “Zenith Fifty-Thousand” was for emergencies only, the way 911 is today. If your neighbour was having a noisy party late into the night, or you wanted to book a tour of the local fire station for a Cub Scout troop, you could dial the non-emergency line in the phone book, or you could dial “0” and ask to be connected to the police or fire service, respectively. The operator would connect you to the necessary non-emergency line.
In 2002, I stayed at a cheap motel in Pennsylvania (just across the West Virginia border) which still had party lines. The one that served my room served two others, with distinctive rings to indicate the room.
To get this joke, you need to remember the commercials for Parkay margarine.
Mary and Kay were best friends until Kay was tragically killed in a car accident. There was a closed casket funeral and Mary stood by it weeping for her late friend. “Oh, poor Kay!” she cried. “Poor Kay!” The coffin lid opened slowly, and a voice from within said, “Butter.”
You could call the operator and ask about anything, they helped you out if they could. I remember someone saying they asked an operator for a recommendation for a restaurant when they were out of town and the operator said it was against the rules to recommend specific businesses, but since he was out of town they* made an exception. Also, you could ask the operator to cut into a call if the line was busy** and you could convince them it was important enough to do it.
*This was a long time ago. I used the pronoun ‘they’ for someone of unknown gender per modern norms, but at the time any reference to a telephone operator, such as in a joke, would have assumed it was a woman referred to as ‘she’ or ‘her’.
** Can you even get a busy signal anymore? Can you even have a phone service without an answering system? Occasionally I get the ‘Unable to place call’ message which may be what happens.
Small town Minnesota. We had a town operator until 1973 or 1974. My dad was the town’s attorney, and we had party line with our house and his office (unusual in town, but the surrounding farms all had party lines). His office number was 224, the house was 224c2 (and a double ring meant the operator was contacting us - we were strictly told to not answer a single ring (unless Dad was home)), and to hang up immediately if he was on the phone if we picked up to make a call.
As I recall, the rural numbers were something like 17r2l1, where I think the numbers after the letters indicated the ring pattern (and the ‘17’ presumably was the line number).
I sometimes get busy signals, from both business and individual lines. And I know people who have no answering system – there may be a voice mail system available to them, but they don’t have it set up, so it’s nonfunctional.
What was the purpose of stating numbers that way? Were they standard (Greenfield would be 4-7, but Irritating or Island or others would work as well)? You could make editorial comments about people “Give Bob a call. His number is…ASswipe 9-2032.”
I understand when a company wants a particular number, like 1-800-FLOWERS because that’s easy to remember and they’re trying to give customers a number they don’t even have to write down.
They were standard, and sometimes the name reflected an actual locality, so the town of Greenfield would want to use Greenfield as their prefix. IIRC earlier five digit numbers would be like ‘GR-123’, and later the 3rd digit for an exchange and 4th digit for the rest was added to account for the rapidly growing number of phones. This all started in a less technological age to make phone numbers ‘friendlier’. Eventually we reached the point where people feared losing their identities to numbers, but now we have also sorts of aliases to use. I can hardly remember any phone numbers now, all the ones that matter are listed in my phone by name.
It was the standard for many years. I presumed that it was thought easier to remember – the first two letters of our phone number stood for the name of a local family and of the road they lived on, which was adjacent to our place. So you needed to remember only five numbers, plus one familiar word. (IIRC any longer-distance calls needed operator assistance anyway.)
I think by now we’re all so used to remembering long numbers that we think of it as a normal thing to do and are mostly pretty good at it; though I wonder how much that ability will be reduced by the need to remember phone numbers having nearly disappeared since now you put them in your phone once and the phone remembers them for you. But we’re still expected to have our social security numbers down.
I know this was a few weeks back, but the book they’re referring to - The Mysteries of Udolpho’ is a real book, published in 1794.
I’m not sure I’d recommend it, unless you’re a huge fan of Gothic mountain descriptions and questionable melodrama, but it’s definitely written to keep the main ‘mystery’ -what’s behind the black veil- for as long as possible.
They were standard exchange names. Here’s more on the exchanges in New York City.. They were instituted to make the numbers easier to remember once they got long enough.
Everybody would give their number using the exchange name, although you might just give the first two letters. My exchange was TAlmadge, so I would give my number either as Talmadge-2-xxxx, or as T-A-2-xxxx. It was actually an adjustment to start giving all-numeral numbers later on.
That itself was an innovation when companies started being able to request numbers that spelled out something.
Occasionally I take a number and try to figure out what the exchange would have been ‘back in the day’. Our home phone would have had the exchange CEntral 2 (232-).
So far I’ve resisted bothering my friends with it: “Hey, Jenny, did you know your landline used to be UNiversity 7-5309?”
This was actually a skit in the '90s. Mad TV? In Living Color? I don’t remember. In any case…
A Spanish-speaking woman is crying by her husband’s coffin. ‘¿Por qué? ¿Por qué?’ she cries. The lid of the coffin opens and a man’s voice from within says, ‘Butter!’
Re phone exchanges: In the beginning they were just six digits in phone numbers, so GReenfield 6542 would be simple enough. Later, phone companies added the extra digits so they could have more exchanges.
There was an Ellery Queen mystery where the victim dials the name of the killer on a phone. It was a six-digit number.
I used to make a lot of long-distance collect calls to my dad when I was growing up. I got a male operator only once, sometime around 1977. I applied for and was actually offered a job as an operator that same summer, but I turned it down for something else.
BIG mistake! My life today would have been very different if I had accepted it.
Yes, memorizing numbers was considered more of a hassle back in the day.
In the late 1950s, comedian Alan King griped, “Do you know what my new telephone exchange is? 598! I have trouble remembering my wife’s birthday, and now this!”
Penn Gillette wrote a column in Spy magazine in the late 1980s, about trying to get the number in Manhattan 212-382-5968 (212 FUC-KYOU). (Can I call you? Sure–FUC-KYOU). It was already in existence.
