I was watching an episode of “I Love Lucy” and in the episode Lucy asks a friend for a phone number and her friend gave her the number as “Murray Hills- 90997”. What’s up with that? What was the old format for telephone numbers? Was “Murray Hills” just a reference to the area code which you were supposed to know? Also, when did the format change from ‘place-numbers’ to 7 numbers?
In English class in middle school we read an old story where someone gave out their telephone number as a word and then 4 numbers. My teacher explained that when she was a child, to make a number easier to remember, you would use the letters on the number keys to make a word. For example, 3-4-2 could be D-I-A, so you’d think of a simple word that started with D-I-A. Diamond, for example. So if you number was 342-5678 you’d say, diamond 5678. I’m assuming it’s the same with Murray Hills. The first digits of the number were probably 687.
This went out of vogue when I was very young but I still remember the old format. It was still seven numbers, Murray Hill would be MH which is 64. It made the number easier to remember. I remember “RIchmond 9” (749) numbers for stores being advertised in the Los Angeles area. Once things at the telcos were fully computerized, the two letter thing fell out of fashion.
Haj
This is also why you often phone numbers in old TV shows given as “Klondike 5” (KL5, or 555). See also BUtterfield 8.
I’m 36, and I can remember seeing phone books when I was very young that listed numbers beginning with “REgent.” That would have been in the very early 1970s.
I remember learning our phone number as PA (Pennsylvania)8-4966 when I was young, even though it was already falling out of fashion then. The older members of my family still said telephone #s like that nearly into the 80s.
I think that there used to be only 6 digits in a telephone number, so that Diamond-5678 was just 34-5678. In some really old movies, the phone numbers they spoke of were only 4 digits long (“Operator- get me 3375.”) Although I guess this could have meant get me 3375 in the same exchange I’m calling from.
That depends on where you were. Back in the day, the phone networks were not standardized, and were only interconnected by sporadic long-distance lines which had to be patched through manually.
Starting around the early 1950s, as the systems became automated, the seven digit number was standardized, and many towns were assigned exchanges based on their names. For example, in the 914 area code, several exchanges beginning with SC (72x) are for Scarsdale, NY. Thus, it made sense to give a number as “Scarsdale 3, 1-2-3-4.”
“Klondike” was a commonly used fictional town because you could use the universal fictional prefix 555.
They actually did that in Seinfeld, in the nineties, a couple of times. I was surprised they did that.
I had a girlfriend who could remember her number being “Worlinworth, 367” - so that’s mid-80s onwards.
Was this in the US? I thought that all US phone numbers conformed to the 3 digit area code and 7 digit all numeric format from the early 60’s onward.
go to www.privateline.com for a good read click on telecom history.
From the site:
You could learn about a fella by knowing his exchange. A MOnument fella was up near 100th Street and West End Avenue. You could picture him coming downtown on the IRT, strolling first to 96th and Broadway for the newspapers, passing the Riviera and Riverside movie theaters (both gone). The ATwater girl was an East Side girl, a taxi-hailing girl, on her way to her job at Benton and Bowles. A CIrcle fella was a midtown fella, entering his CIrcle-7 Carnegie-area office with a sandwich from the Stage Deli. And what about a SPring-7 girl, twirling the ends of her long brown hair as she lay on her bed talking to you on te phone? A Greenwich Village girl. A 777 girl is nothing. She is invisible. She is without irony, seldom listens to music."
That’ll be the “location” option, then :rolleyes:
There’s a George Gamester column in today’s Toronto Star about a 82-year-old local farmer named Tom Jackson. It mentions his boyhood home on 12th Street in what was then the outlying town of New Toronto, where the phone number was 4. Yes, 4. 
Apparently there were only a dozen or so phones in town. From his age, this would be the early 1920s.
I wonder who had the first three phones?
Back in the late 50’s early 60’s it really depended where you live. If you lived in the city, you probably had the 7-digit dialing by then. We lived in a small town and it was 5-digit dialing. I remember we even had a party-line, we shared a line with several neighbors. Crazy 
I know someone who had a party line as late as 1995! Mind you, this was in rural Ontario, at a marina that was literally at the end of the road…
ccwaterback has it right, IMHO. As a kid in the 60’s, DIamond 3-0835 was my home phone number, and surrounding towns had exchanges such as TUrner, OLdfield, OSborne, WIndsor, PIlgrim. I remember seeing business cards and signage using that format well into the 80’s in the Phila area. I have to laugh when I see old rotary phones in the city bearing this identifier of a forgotten era.
as a kid my phone number started with Taylor-2, as a teen it was TA-2, then in the 70s it became 822.
Sorry haj, wrongo.
MUrray Hill was MU (6+8), not MH (6+4).
History lesson: Murray Hill was named for the Murray family estate located around the east end of 34th Street in Manhattan. During the Revolutionary War Mrs. Murray and her two comely daughters, American sympathizers, delayed the British commanders of the landing force that invaded Manhattan. They entertained the leaders with refreshments long enough for the American army to flee from the southern tip of the island – where they would have been trapped against the sea – to a defensible position at Harlem Heights in the north. Charming legend has it that the Murray ladies’ tactic was intentional, but historians are pretty certain it was just a happy coincidence.
Damn! You find the neatest stuff.