Many of us grew up before the current 10-digit numbers were standard. No area code needed, and many smaller towns only needed four or five digits. And we used those letters on the phone keys! Like CHumley-477 (named for the area near Chumley Ravine… later translated to 244-7700).
But my “interesting random fact” is that I had a friend whose number took forever to dial with a rotary dial: 588-8080… you had to push those 8’s and Zeros all the way around the dial, then waaaaait for it to clickclickclick back before you could enter the next number.
But as soon as numerical keypads arrived, his digits were all in the middle column, and he suddenly had the quickest phone number!
In the small town where I went to school, the old phone numbers were one or two digits long.
Later, they switched to three letters and four digits.
In our case, though, we didn’t get a telephone until I was in high school. At that time, when you called a number, the operator would come on the line and ask for your number before letting the call connect. And that carried on through the 1980s. I remember once getting into a bit of an argument with an operator when I was calling an 800 number since they weren’t going to bill it to us anyway.
My grandparents lived across the field and they had a telephone long before we got one. Their telephone was out of a different town than where I went to school (there were several towns about the same distance away) and I don’t know about the numbers out of that town.
They did have one of those old style wooden crank telephones where you would turn the crank to get the operator’s attention. (I assume that the electrical charge rang a bell, but it would have been more interesting if it shocked the operator.) I wonder if my grandparents even had telephone numbers then or whether you just told the operator who you wanted to talk to.
I did find a high school yearbook from the town that provided telephone service in my community. In the ads in the back, I found a grocery store with a telephone number of 4 and a chevy and implement dealer with a telephone number of 232. The big grain elevator had a telephone number of 73 and the livestock commission (sale ring) had a telephone number of 125.
Note that the town is a little smaller than the one where I went to school, but their telephone service covered a much larger area including at least two other towns.
According to National Postal Museum historian Nancy Pope, the first known case of a mailed baby was in 1913 when Mr. and Mrs. Jesse Beauge of Glen Este, Ohio, shipped their 10-pound infant son to his grandmother’s home about a mile away, paying 15 cents in postage and springing for $50 in insurance (just in case something bad happened).
Records do not indicate whether Grandmother Beauge received her mail in a mailbox or through a letter slot.
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Edna Neff, 6, was sent 720 miles from Pensacola, Florida to Christiansberg, Virginia, where her father lived.
Interesting. On the BBC radio Children’s Hour Christmas broadcast, for some years in the 1950s, they had an “intrepid reporter” sent as a parcel through the mails, with all the appropriate sound effects. As a child I sort of believed it for quite some time.
I don’t know if they still do it, but there used to be a number of people back in the 1990s who would routinely try to see what kind of outrageous objects they could send through the mail. Often, no packaging at all.
Things like bricks, baseballs, bowling balls, garden tools, … with the address and stamps affixed to the outsides of the objects.
If the postman wouldn’t take the object, they would sometimes hide near where the mail truck pulled up and would wait for the postman to get out to go deliver what he had for that block. They would then run up to the truck, put whatever it was inside, and run off.
Also, one of my brothers was a long time pilot in Alaska. He once told me about someone building a house wa out in the country and having the building materials (including cinder blocks or bricks) shipped in by mail. He said it was less expensive to mail the materials to the building site than it was to have them hauled in on a truck.
The elevators here in Myers were not “automatic”. If you wanted it to go back to the ground floor, somebody had to set the control to “down”. When you got to “ground”, somebody had to look out the window to line up the floor level.
In the late 70’s - mid 80’s they were replaced with automatic lifts. Lifts were used by women with prams, and by the elderly, and even by people coming in from the country who didn’t like escalators and didn’t know the store layout, so having a staffed elevator was part of the service, it wasn’t necessary but it wasn’t just ‘promotional’
That apparently did happen back in 1916 in Utah, and the post office changed rules to prevent that from happening again.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it became an urban legend for various places.
Yes, it was famously cheaper to send bricks by mail in 1916. A Utah banker named William Horace Coltharp used this method to build the Bank of Vernal in Vernal, Utah, by exploiting a loophole in the newly created U.S. Postal Service Parcel Post system.
When I was 17, I did the trick where you send a letter to someone for free, by putting THEIR address as the return address, and “forgetting” to include a stamp.
It worked! It only works if you live near the other person (he was in a town five miles away).
This reminds me of the trick where kids would call their parents “collect”. Parents would decline the call, as just the call attempt itself informed them that the child was safe or reached their destination.
Yes! My stepfather in the 1970s had exactly this routine with his daughter away in college. She would use a particular nickname if all was okay, and a different one if she wanted him to call her back.
Similarly, my high school had a pay phone which you could first dial a number without putting in your dime. Once the call was connected, you had 5-10 seconds to insert your dime before the call was cut off. Of course, when one needed a ride home, one would call, and when a parent would answer, one would quickly say “I’m at school and need a ride home!”
And every parent knew the number so they could call back if necessary. (The last four digits were 9494).
Our downtown (Montreal) department store (Eaton’s) was completed/opened in 1931. It was originally built with four banks (labelled A through D) of elevators, with eight (numbered 1 through 8) in each bank. All were staffed - although maybe not all 32 simultaneously.
Shortly after - the first (narrow wooden) escalator was installed - between the ground floor and one floor up. I remember it from the 1960s - I think it was removed soon after.
Two elevator banks were removed and replaced with escalators - probably in the 1940s or 1950s. A third was removed in the 1970s. The fourth bank of eight remained - still with their uniformed operators, the gates, and the semi-circle above each door with arrows showing the floor where it was. When the store closed in the 1990s, one elevator (express to the 9th floor restaurant) remained - still manually operated. The others were automated.
Today - the old store is now a mall, with offices on the upper floors. Some of the last bank of elevators remain, but all are automated. The memorial plaque listing all the 263 Eaton’s employees who made the “supreme sacrifice” in WW2 remains in the elevator lobby.
We’d do that from our land line in college. They’d decline and then call us back. Collect calls were more expensive than regular calls. Them calling us would mean they paid for the regular call instead of us.
From 1965 through 2020, there was a huge surplus electronics store in Dayton, Ohio called Mendelson’s. I think it was the largest of its kind in the world. It was located on the third floor of a 600,000 ft² building that contained six floors. To get to the third floor, you had to hop onto an old freight elevator that was operated by a human. The elevator was in operation up until the store closed.
When I was on the elevator, I was most fascinated by how dangerous it was when it was in motion. If someone were to stick their head over the gate, their head would be gone in a matter of seconds.
The two letter prefix was short for the actual location of the telephone exchange. Yes, the numbers were right there on the dial, but so were the letters. Which is more natural? If you want to buy a train ticket to Hooterville, it’s a lot less intuitive asking for a ticket to Station #547, than just asking for one to Hooterville.
It probably started out that way (I’m guessing here) but in more populous areas it evolved into a system that just included memorable words. I grew up in the PYramid-8 exchange, had an uncle in the LIncoln-1 exchange and a friend whose number was in IVanhoe-9