Early phone numbers

[Dan Hunkele]

Our number was FAIrfax-3627 but nobody used the phone excepting mom and dad. Used to be I could tell where someone lived by the exchange number. Today the area code is different from what it was and there is so many exchange numbers it is hard to tell where they live unless they have an old exchange.

[Garth Sheane]

In Manitoba, when I was knee high to a grasshopper, our phone number was 301 ring 21 the actual ring was two longs and a short. It was a favorite past-time for rubbernecks to listen in on the party lines. I seem to recall that on New Years Eve, the "operator" would do something that caused everybody's phone to ring at 12:00 am for a few minutes. I don't really think of 67 as being that old, but I guess it is when you think about how far communication technology has come, along with a lot of other technologies.

[Moses Yoder]

Technology builds upon itself, multiplying exponentially. In 20 years I will be 67, wonder where we will be then? It is just a matter of time until the computer is built into the human brain. It will only take one break through.

[David Helm]

Most of you guys are skipping one level. Our number in 1952 was WA(lnut) 2509. There was no extra number; 2 letters and 4 numbers. This was in a relatively large city (Dayton,Ohio). When they went to 2 letters and 5 numbers was somewhere around 1958 or 9.

[Jerome Stanek]

when I was 5 ours was Shadyside 1 4052 I had to learn it for Kindergarden. that was in Cleveland in 1954

[Greg R Bradley]

ERB_BusCard.jpg
One of my Grandfather's business cards with a single digit phone number. Perhaps my father will let us know when they used these numbers.

[Jim Koepke]

Most of you guys are skipping one level.

Well here are three levels:

Old Advertising Rulers.jpg

I sometimes wonder if any of those places are still in business.

I also wonder about "Acme." According to the dictionary it is a noun meaning, "the point at which someone or something is at its best.

I guess after the Roadrunner cartoons it kind of lost favor among serious business interests.

jtk

[Dan Hunkele]

I wonder if it was just a phone book ploy

Acme Auto Repair
Bob's Auto Repair
Cheaper Auto Repair
Etc-Etc

[Kev Williams]

Wasn't all that long ago that some towns with few phones only needed to dial the numbers AFTER their own prefix. Mr. Bradley's neighbor probably only had to dial "9" to call him.

My dad's 1942 yearbook has several 5 digit phone numbers for stores who sponsored ads.

[Karl Andersson]

And of course, don't forget Pensylvania six five oh oh oh...which, according to Wikipedia is the number of the hotel Pennsylvania in Manhattan and New York City switched to 7 digits around 1930- ten years before Glen Miller's song. Apparently all businesses around Penn Station in NY had the same PEnnsylvania starter code. In northern VA I had two older advertising tools that the first word was the county or city - one was Arlington 3-### and the other Fairfax.

I'm sure urban areas had "the latest thing" long before more rural areas. I'm just a couple years older than Moses (the OP, not the biblical guy) and the only old phone tech we had in the 70's suburbs was if you flicked the "hang up lever" a few times, you got the operator, and if you dailed "o" during a call, you could make a party line by calling someone else. Well, those, and rotary dials and the now-antique 25-foot long phone cord so my brother could trade whispers with his girlfriends while sitting in his room down the hall with the door closed.

[Jerome Stanek]

BR549 Junior Samples

[Jim Rimmer]

BR549 Junior Samples

An aside to this post. I registered my car in Bryan county Oklahoma back in the 70s. Then the license plates had 2 letter designations for the county and Bryan was BR. The rest of my tag was 1549. Close enough; I had BR-1549.

[Larry Browning]

I remember in the small town where I went to college (in the 70's) there was what we called the "beep line" where there was a particular number you could call that returned a slow busy signal, and you could say things in between the beeps that everyone dialed in could hear. It was a way to meet girls. Sort of a early version of facebook I suppose.

Also, at some point in the late 70's or 80's the phone company decided to convert all the alpha prefixes into the numeric equivalents. So you didn't get a new number, it was just written down as all numeric.

The prefixes were very geographic, so everyone living in your neighborhood had the same prefix. If you moved to a new neighborhood in the same town, you had to get a new phone number. I think even if you moved across the street you had to get a new number. You could tell what part of town someone lived in based on their phone number prefix. This continued even when they dropped the alpha prefixes.

[Scott T Smith]

If I recall correctly the name was the name of the local central office, and the first two or three digits were the same as the first three letters of the CO name.

[James Runchey]

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.