Recently I contacted an older woman in the neighborhood where I grew up. We chatted for a bit and I asked about another neighbor and wondered if she had her phone number. This was the response I got…
Sure…it is Baldwin3-1212.
For a second, I thought I misheard or she had lost her mind but it then occurred to me that when I was young, this is the way numbers were stated.
I hadn’t heard this way of repeating a phone number in years and was wondering if many people still do this around the US? I would imagine with all the phone numbers currently in use, they are probably not assigned by the name of the town anymore but if you had an older number, it would still work. Have other countries used the same method and if so, do they continue to do so?
Definitely as pointless a question as they come but I really am curious.
If you click on the sentence after that one, you’ll bring up this discussion. Coincidentally, the second post (Anonymous, Sun, 22 Sep 1996) features the SPring 7 combination which began the phone number I grew up with, and which my parents still have.
My dad is a big fan of the exchanges, and kept the last Cleveland-area Ohio Bell phone book (mid-'60’s) which incorporated them in the listings. As a jazz musician, Dad is fond of such song titles as PEnnsylvania 6-5000, as well as the fact that Artie Shaw named his quintet the Gramercy Five as a nod to the bandleader’s home telephone exchange.
When I lived in London, England, back in the middle of the last century, our phone number started with TER for “Terminus”. I can remember that much: I can remember what the numbers were!
When I was in H.S. (1950’s) our number was WAlbridge 8-8154, but you only needed to dial the 8-8154 unless you were calling long distance, then you had to give the operater the exchange. In some small towns/rural areas, you only had to dial the last four numbers, maybe only the last three.
My grandmother’s number in Peterborough ended in 1216 from the time she moved there in the late 1940s, but I don’t ever remember people saying it with an exchange name. It would have been RI 2-1216, probably something like RIverdale.
Up until the early 1990s, you only needed to dial the last four digits in Gilmour, Ontario. Come to think of it, the houses around the marina on Weslemkoon Lake had a party line even as late as 1995!
Getting internet access there was and is a real pain.
I learned it at home, but also at school when we had lessons in how to use the telephone in first grade. Including dialing practice. (Take your finger out of the hole and let the dial go back by itself.) We learned party line etiquette, including how to interrupt (politely) in case of emergency, and not to interrupt for anything short of an emergency. Sometime during my grade school years we went to private lines and the exchange changed from BL8 to just 258. The official instruction was to dial the 8 and then the number, but it worked best if we just used the last four. It still worked that way into the early seventies, but I don’t know when it started needing all 7 digits.
My grandmother’s number was LIberty 5-3193, and my aunt was at a JAckson 5-xxxx number. My mom told me that our first phone number was only three numbers, and the local operator would come on to ask you who you’d like to call, then stick your jack in their socket! Then when we moved to the next town where I grew up, it was ROger 8-3061. Up until the late '60s, you only had to dial the last five numbers. If you were making a long distance call, the operator would come on and say “Number, please.” Boy, that seems like a lifetime ago!
BLackburn6-2584 was our home phone number when I was growing up in the 1960’s. Local calls could be made with just the last five digits, but you had to dial 0 for long distance calls and give the number to a real, live operator to put through for you.
As late as the 1980s, in small-town BC, we called locally with only five numbers. It may have been only four in the 70s, but I was a little too young to make a lot of calls, then. I used a rotary dial telephone, attached to the wall, as late as 1991.
Speaking of BC, why do the early-1980s ads in this old magazone I dug up have long-distance and toll-free numbers as “dial 1-800-xxx-xxxx; in BC dial 112-800-xxx-xxxx”?
Sunspace, where I lived in Southern Ontario, long distance was 112 for years, until they caught up with the new system where it was now just 1. I suspect BC hadn’t upgraded at the time of that ad.
Interesting. I have no memory of this. However, when I was young, long-distance calls were considered Expensive and A Special Occasion in my family, so I never saw a lot of them. My aunt from Germany would call us twice a year, once at Christmas and once on our birthdays. I never dialed long-distance at that time.
Even as late as high school (1979ish), I used to ride my bike ten kilometres to a pay phone just across the town line so I could pay a quarter to make a local call to a certain girl instead of making a long-distance call from home…
Until the mid-80’s our town had 2 exchanges starting with 62. I think I only saw MA a couple of times to indicate the exchange. The nice thing was being able to dial the 5 digits without having to dial 62 at all. We also told friends our numbers by omitting the 62. I got a lot of funny looks when I described this to people from Toronto just 4 years later who couldn’t understand why I only stated 5 digits.
My grandmother had come over to our condo and when she stepped up to the door, she looked at it and said “Oh, that’s our old phone number, 2308.” I figured she was omitting the exchange, but no, that was the full number when they had their phone in the 40’s. Small town.
Like Sunspace, I had to call home one day and tried a payphone. I got the message that it was long distance. The people nearby heard me explaining this to my friends and they sent us to a payphone across the street where it was a local call. Actually, we’ve got funny boundaries around here. There is actually an area where it is long distance to call a mile away.