CYpress 5-8403. Yeah baby! Old school!
And I completely agree with Rico about telephone prefix prestige. You can tell a lot about a person from their prefix…
I thought it was “Heap Big “T” for tel-e-vi-sion.” Like Indian talk.
The BRadshaw/CRestview confluence may have meant they were “splitting a box” originally (not sure that’s the right jargon): the old hardware switches were in “boxes” that each handled the 10,000 numbers of an NNX. When they had two areas that were both small but expected to grow, sometimes they’d use ONE box and split it, assigning 0-4999 in one NNX and 5000-9999 in the other. This worked, but meant the other NNX would also work – so if you were CRestview 1-1234, then dialing BRadshow 1-1234 would ring your phone.
We had a weirder symptom with an old switch in the early 1980s. My parents’ number at the time was (say) 742-3456. They would get relatively frequent wrong numbers that were wildly off – say, 743-4561. Way too wrong to be just “I misdialed”. Eventually I noticed a pattern: the embedded “3456”. Some experimentation proved that if you dialed an NNX that wasn’t local in that area code, the switch (figuratively) saw the first two digits and said “Uh huh, that’s OK”; when it saw the third one, it said “Nope” BUT dumped the call back to the 742 exchange, WITH THAT THIRD DIGIT AS THE FOURTH DIGIT. So you could dial my parents by dialing 743-456 (six digits!) and it would ring. Either that, or you had to dial a seventh digit, but it didn’t matter what you dialed; this was a while ago.
Eventually Bell Canada put in a DMS100 and it all went away.
Quasi-related anecdote: my brother-in-law grew up in a VERY small town, remembers his childhood phone# as “4”…no more!
And yes, I remember party lines as late as the mid-1980s, in rural Ontario.
In my town, it was HIllcrest-4 or HIllcrest-9, but I know that as a matter of trivia from my childhood. I never heard anybody use them (we’re talking early 1970s here.) I saw a Mad Magazine parody of phone listings that used them and was baffled.
Here’s a website I found a couple of years back that is trying to catalog all the old names for posterity.
I once saw the “phone book” for what was then the tiny, relatively isolated seaside town of Nags Head, N.C. in the 1920s. It was one page with names and numbers typed on it. None of the numbers was higher, in its entirety, than “30,” IIRC.
LIberty-2 (542).
Long Island City, perhaps? My exchange in Queens was BA (Bayside) 9.
AXminster 7-7240
Ravenna, OH
ATwater 1 (in San Diego).
We had ORiole for awhile, too. Before that, it was MUrray Hill.
Note that none of these had the letters Q or Z in them. The “1” key, like the “0” was never assigned letters on US phones. I don’t know why. Later, early cell phones added the Q and Z (along with a dash) to the “1” key, but now they are usually added to the “7” and “9” keys. SMS’ing would be tough without them, but no one saw that coming in the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s…
Because neither the first digit nor the second digit of an exchange could be “1” or “0”. A “1” in the first digit was historically used in one-town telephone companies that AT&T or GenTel hadn’t taken over to mean “Get me out of this one-hoss system and out to the surrounding area.” A “1” or “0” in the second digit meant “This is the second digit of an area code, not an exchange.” (Area codes were used within the telephone system long before they were exposed to the public.) Later, when area codes and exchanges began to run out, “0” and “1” were permitted in the second digit of exchanges (provided that the second and third digits were not both “1”), and “2” through “9” were permitted in the second digit of area codes, while the old leading “1” was reapplied to mean “An area code, not an exchange, follows.”
Mullan, Idaho PRospect 5
Wallace, Idaho SKyline 2, SKyline 3
Kellogg, Idaho SUnset 4, SUnset 6
Growing up on the southside of Tulsa, mine was RIverside 9. When we moved to the Brookside area it changed to 583 but I’ll be damned if I can make sense of the 58. pinkfreud, any ideas?
In Tulsa, the 58 exchange was originally LUther. I have quite a bit of nostalgia for the LUther exchange, since my very first apartment was in that area.
SWift.
North Olmsted (suburb of Cleveland), Ohio: SPring 7-xxxx (not only do my parents still live in the house and have the number, my dad often says the exchange name when asked how he can be reached by phone. People old enough to remember exchanges immediately understand; younger folks who are befuddled get an apology and all-digit restatement, or – if they express interest in an explanation – a history lesson.)
My dad’s mother (who had a party line for a time) lived in the MElrose section of the city of Cleveland. Other family members were served by ATlantic. Long after exchanges generally fell out of favor, one Cleveland business’s jingle featured an invitation to call GArfield 1-2323. Let’s see if any of the Northeast Ohio Dopers take the bait…
Oh, geez, I remember party lines! When I was a child, I used to listen to these two old ladies gossiping. Occasionally they could hear me breathing or snickering or something and would start asking if anyone else was on the line.
My childhood phone number was 843632. I’m too young to remember ones like TG 3632.
My six-digit childhood number was cool even at the time when most in Sydney were seven, but there were still some cooler ones at five. They’re all eight now.
Party lines are the only reason why I have only the second phone number I’ve ever had today – because my family had to change from the first, which was on a party line. My mother put her foot down, refused to abide by the P&T office’s dictum – and we got a new number.
I still remember the old number. Have done since I was 4, around 40 years ago now. There’s never been cool exchange letters here, though, just numbers.