Early phone numbers

[Jim Koepke]

We got married in 1953 and had a Mercury 9 phone number and we still have the same number, now dialed as 639 xxxx. I don't remember when they dropped the Mercury. Seems to me we might of started out with just 4 digits for a while, small town then.

In the early days each central office had its own designation. Mercury xxxx was a way for a caller to tell the operator across town in the Peoria central office how to route the call.

As an area grew there would be a Mercury 2, 3, 4 and so on.

jtk

[Jim Becker]

Yup...the phone number in the house I lived from birth through 1st grade had a phone number OR6-3538 with the OR standing for "Orleans". That would still be the exchange, but they were named back then. (Amazing I can remember that number being 57 years old! But not most of the subsequent numbers...)

[Bill Cunningham]

It's funny, I can't remember what my phone number was back then, probably because I never called myself (if I did I probably got a busy signal). But, my Grandmother was WA(lnut)5-4811, and my first girlfriend's was CH(erry)9-5204. Yup we had those name/number combinations in Canada too. When I moved into my current home 44years ago our ring was (two short) we have the same ring now to denote a long distance call coming in. Usually a
Telemarketer warning..

[Jim Becker]

Yea, the 'ring' you mention, Bill, is something I remember early on from when it was common for "party lines" to be provisioned in a neighborhood. Phones were very much a luxury at that point and the technology just couldn't support everyone having their own "line" cost effectively. We didn't keep the party line, however...it went private. My father was in insurance sales and the privacy was essential for business calls.

[Von Bickley]

Our phone number was:

ALpine 36949 = AL36949 = 2536949

another prefix was SunSet = SS = 77