At a store where I worked several years ago, we had a customer who gave his entire number out as seven letters. His number was 326-6339. The phone number was printed on his checks as DAMN FEW. 
so was Detroit’s; back in the day Detroit phone numbers all started “88x” a/k/a TUxedo. we lived in the suburb just north, which was PRescott (77x.)
I remember SWift, SHerwood and POrter where I grew up. Ours was SWift. You’d’ve thought it was End Times when they did away with that.
In St. Louis a lot of the exchanges were named for the streets the switching stations were located on. The building and equipment for EVergreen actually was located on EVergreen, ADams was on Adams, etc.
Of course, there was also AXminster. The phone company just couldn’t let 29*-**** go to waste.
Maybe *you *can, but my phone number has a 1 as its second digit. 
That specifically became possible in 1995 when area codes started having a digit between 2 and 9 as a second digit, but something similar was happening in 1982 in greater Los Angeles – one of my neighbors in Glendale had a 500-xxxx number.
Also, even until 1980 or so, my grandparents had 5-digit dialing to each other in Kingsport, TN. (Kingsport was served by GTE instead of Southeastern Bell, so that could be part of the reason why that was possible.) I think Kingsport’s main (only?) prefix was CIrcle (for Church Circle, the original center of the town).
Manhattan had lots of exchanges, here are a couple of sites that list some of them
The last time I remember actually hearing someone use the 2 letter exchange was in 1990 when I sublet a Manhattan apartment and the primary tenant, an older woman who had lived there 25 years, told me that the phone number was UNiversity-6. I hadn’t heard the system used for many years before that and it felt like we were back in a time warp.
Exchanges were originally thought of as buildings, with specific locations, rather than mere groupings of telephone numbers. So exchange names were often geographically meaningful (such as the neighborhood, or street they were located on), so long as they could easily be distinguished when heard.
When subscriber dialing was introduced in the 1920s, the users dialed the first three letters of the exchange name using the letters on the phone dial, followed by the four numbers for the specific line to ring. So the three-digit numbers represented by the names now had to be distinctive. That still left some room for creativity, but new exchanges in growing areas often needed to use letters that didn’t suggest anything very local. When Chicago’s North Shore suburbs were given 257, for example, that doesn’t spell much except ALPine.
In 1948, Chicago shifted to “2 + 5” dialing, already in use in some other big cities and becoming a Bell System standard. To make the conversion easy, the third digit was kept the same wherever possible. So if your number had previously been HARrison 7186, now it was HA7-7186, since the R dials 7 anyway. In some places this wasn’t possible, and more importantly, new third digits could be introduced to expand capacity.
Eventually that system also reached its limits: you can’t spell anything for a number beginning with 95. All-number dialing was the standard for new phone numbers by the 1970s, but since the phone book only reset entries that needed to be changed, the Chicago phone book still listed old-style numbers until the early 1980s.
Back when I was in the college band, on one of our trips (playing for a basketball tournament), we were staying in the Hotel Pennsylvania. Several band members were excited to realize that they already knew the phone number: Pennsylvania 6-5000. Until they tried to actually call it in the wee hours after a night on the town, and discovered that that was abbreviated as 736 (PE), not 726 (PA).
Word (or rather the word’s first two letters) followed by 5 digits was the norm throughout my youth. IBM’s photo-digital storage system had the code name ‘Cypress’ because CYpress (CY) was the word associated with IBM San Jose telephone numbers.
We had a private line, I think; but I remember being scolded at my grandparents’ house when I picked up the phone on the other party’s ring.
I also still remember the phone number of my youth, though that was fifty years ago. The only other California number I remember was the one where I changed all the digits (not just the first two) into letters and memorized the resulting pseudo-word. I once got a phone call from a girl wanting a date only because, lacking pen and paper, she’d memorized the pseudo-word I’d told her.
In our medium-sized town in Northern California, we had to dial the last five digits of the number IIRC.
ETA: And back in the day, click-counts were still used for phone numbers instead of tones. To dial 411, you could just tap the hang-up bar: Click-click-click-click Pause Click Pause Click. You had to have quick fingers to “dial” a number with an 8, 9 or 0 (actually ten) this way.
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Went far far away a few years back in San Jose. to call my neighbor it is a 1 plus the 10 digit phone number.
On campus (mid-late 70’s), since all phones were the same exchange you could reach anyone by just dialing the last 4 digits of their number. But the “fun” part was that if you initiated the call, only you could end the call. That is to say if you refused to hang up, the person you called could not place another call. We used this “feature” to harass the campus radio station into playing songs we wanted to hear. Yeah, we were assholes.
We’ve used 7 numbers for as long as I can remember. What has passed is the ability to identify where people were located by their number. North Minneapolis always started with 521/522/529. Northeast Minneapolis were 731/733/735. City employees were 348. Minnetonka was 545/546.
Then they added different area codes for the Twin Cities and with the rise of cell phones, you have no idea where anyone is calling from.
About 10 years ago, my daughter bought my mom a new phone directory and offered to transfer numbers over. One of the first entries was the letter/number combo, which confused my daughter. It led to a neat discussion about party lines, exchanges, etc.
Another old timer who remembers living in a small town where local calls were 4 digits. Each town in the area had a single digit prefix. So if you knew someone in another town you added the town digit and their 4 digit number. Long distance outside that group of towns required an operator.
I was at a university where internally you only had to use the last 4 digits. They ran out of 4 digit numbers and switched to 5. One extra digit for one part of campus, a different digit for the other part. But keep in mind this was internally. Half the campus got a new external number. It was a nightmare for a surprisingly long while as people adjusted to the new system. Lots of wrong numbers.
If the Hillsdale Tow Company was from Hillsdale, MI they never really dialed the whole number.
I’ve never seen this in another city in modern times, but when I lived there, you only needed to dial 5 digits. The exchange was 437, but you only had to dial the 7.
So if you want to get your car towed there, you can just dial 7-4479.
No, they weren’t. It was MUrray Hill = 68.
The mistake was common enough that ads for businesses in the Murray Hill exchange would give letters MU to make it clear.
I think the number you mean was MUrray Hill 7-0700, the number for NY Times delivery.
Garfield 1-2323
Garfield 1-2323!
The Northeast Ohio folks on the board will get it 
Because you would never learn if they just did it for you.
In newer conversions, you still get that recorded error message, only it continues: “…for only 95 cents, we can connect you to that number…”
When I grew up, there was only one exchange (BElmont) for the whole town of 11,000 people. You could dial the last 5 digits of the 7 (2L+5N) and get connected. But that didn’t work from my phone at home – we were on a farm outside the city limits, and all our neighbors still had party lines. (We had one at first, but switched to a private line about 1956.*) For some reason, that shortcut dialing wouldn’t work on ‘extended’ lines.
In a nearby village (population about 40-50), the phone exchange was installed in the pantry attached to a friends’ grandmothers’ kitchen. And she was the operator, none of the phones in that village had dials. That meant some changes for her, since she had to be home to answer it. Like her church ladies group had to meet at her house instead of rotating the meeting location. She went to church & lunch afterwards every Sunday morning for a couple of hours; I asked her once “what if someone wants to make a phone call during that time?” Her response: “well, they can’t, can they? And they ought to be in church Sunday mornings, not gabbing on the phone.”.
- We were charged extra by the phone company for having a private line. It was a specific amount, based on the mileage from our farm to the central Office. They continued to add that charge to the phone bill every single month, for decades. Even long after they didn’t even offer party lines any more. I eventually discovered that when my mother was in her 80s, and i was helping her pay her bills. She had been paying this extra fee for nearly 60 years!
I raised some hell with the phone company about that, and the Utilities Commission. Eventually the phone company agreed to pay her back, but only for 5 years (claimed FCC regulations wouldn’t allow them to go further back). And not cash back either – just credit toward future bills.
Why should you learn if they would do it for you?
Google has deliberately designed their browser around that concept. I see many computers where Google has replaced the URL address line with a search box. Even though you may know the actual URL, you search for it, and Google takes you there. They don’t try to teach you how to do it right, they just do it for you, even if your way is longer.
With a lot of these systems that will no longer let you dial the old way, it’s because the old way can’t work any more, because it gets in the way of the new way. Suppose that you pick up your phone and dial four digits. How does the phone company know if those four digits are all you’re dialing, for your neighbor on the same exchange, or just the first four digits of some other 7 or 10 digit phone number? It used to be done via restrictions on the numbers, such as the second digit of an area code always being 0 or 1 (which meant that for any shorter number you could call, 0 or 1 was never allowed as a second digit). But then there got to be too many area codes, and so they had to add some with other second digits, and so that didn’t work any more.
But what, then, of those recorded messages that told you that you did it wrong? How could those have worked? Well, in some cases, the change was publicized before being actually turned on, so there was a grace period. And in some cases, it could tell that you weren’t trying to call some other number because that other number didn’t yet exist. But the changes had to be fully implemented eventually, and you can’t count on any given number staying unassigned forever.