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Related: Culture Forums, Support ForumsRemember when?: Telephone numbers had letter prefixes.
Two that I recall having were AMherst and AXminster.
fierywoman
(7,683 posts)Floyd R. Turbo
(26,546 posts)Siwsan
(26,260 posts)PI4-XXXX. That phone number has been our family phone number since around 1954. As soon as we sell Mom's house, it will be no more.
I seem to remember the PI was for PIlgrim.
irisblue
(32,969 posts)Check the phone company. I told my Mom, I'm taking hers when the time comes.
ashling
(25,771 posts)Piiilgrim
Arkansas Granny
(31,515 posts)Do you remember party lines? We were on an eight party line.
Floyd R. Turbo
(26,546 posts)That mustve been wild!
FSogol
(45,481 posts)My friends were always amazed that you had to check that the other family wasn't using the phone before making a call.
csziggy
(34,136 posts)Because my Dad had his business office in our home, the phone technically was his business line. We were not allowed to answer the phone until we could reliably take messages. And we were not allowed to tie up the phone even in the evenings.
With four daughters in the house, Dad had to be strict about our phone use or he never would have gotten any of his business calls!
Borchkins
(724 posts)Floyd R. Turbo
(26,546 posts)samnsara
(17,622 posts)...and the three minute warning on the phone? long distance rates! ( 10 min for a dollar after 10 pm!)
Remember staying up that late??
Floyd R. Turbo
(26,546 posts)ExciteBike66
(2,341 posts)braddy
(3,585 posts)Iggo
(47,552 posts)But I still remember commercials on TV instructing me to call Richmond 9------.
asiliveandbreathe
(8,203 posts)OL - for Olympia (could be Olympic, too) Natick,, Mass - but then, I also retired from AT&T after 30 years..New England Tel is my alma mater - I was a senior in HS..worked PT until graduation, then went FT as a cord board operator and then worked in dial bureau assigning tel. numbers..(of course I had an easy number to remember 2525)...
I saw rotary change to Touchtone..hard wire change to modular...don't even get me started on Cellphones....is tough to get old, but I always remember numbers and names...
This was a great exercise for recall.....tks
samnsara
(17,622 posts)...fo fo fo.. fo fo o fo I just couldnt get thru the accent.
Basic LA
(2,047 posts)It seemed like every other commercial was like "Call now at Murray Hill 9 5421" or whatever.
CTyankee
(63,912 posts)Now I feel special! My son who now lives in NYC is impressed!
rsdsharp
(9,170 posts)8-4752. The only phone number I ever had until I went to college. It started as a party line. It was the number my family (later just my Mom) had from August 1953 until 1985.
Glorfindel
(9,729 posts)The neighboring town had LEnox.
DinahMoeHum
(21,784 posts)n/t
procon
(15,805 posts)that was accessed through a switchboard operator. We dialed O to reach our local operator and asked to be connected to the switchboard in her town. Then we told that operator grandma's two digit number and she would manually send a specific ringing cadence that was assigned to her telephone. It was confusing because sometimes another person on the partyline would mistake the ring code as theirs and pick up the phone.
50 Shades Of Blue
(9,985 posts)Yonnie3
(17,434 posts)Our new phone had a rotary dial, but for more than a year you made your calls by picking up the phone and telling the operator the number you wanted to call.
Before that we had a 3 digit number.
mitch96
(13,895 posts)RO stood for ROckville. The neat thing was you could kinda sorta know where the phone was by the number...
m
Runningdawg
(4,516 posts)I'm also old enough to remember when you had to talk to an operator to make a long-distance call and when you didn't talk shit on the phone because you never knew who was listening in on the "party line".
KatyaR
(3,445 posts)We were on a party line out in the middle of nowhere. We were 401, my grandparents were 402.
Yonnie3
(17,434 posts)The line was 8 party, but it didn't ring often.
elleng
(130,895 posts)Eugene
(61,878 posts)Boston. I also remember AVenue, HIghlands, and the much-advertised ANdrew8.
brucefan
(1,549 posts)rzemanfl
(29,557 posts)The Velveteen Ocelot
(115,683 posts)I still remember that phone number after almost 50 years even though half the time I can't remember anybody's current numbers.
Freedomofspeech
(4,223 posts)Fla Dem
(23,656 posts)Last edited Tue Mar 13, 2018, 09:46 PM - Edit history (1)
PoliticAverse
(26,366 posts)Ohiogal
(31,989 posts)FRanklin-4 9389.
My husband's was RIverside but I don't recall the number.
I haven't thought about that in years! Pretty neat.
Anyone grow up in Cleveland area? Remember the commercial
"Call GArfield 1 2323!"
Lindsay
(3,276 posts)I now live in NC, but born in Cleveland and spent a lotta years there.
Lindsay
(3,276 posts)will never forget GArfield 1-2323, a jingle for an aluminum siding company that advertised for years during baseball broadcasts.
Was that the one narrated by Jimmy Dudley? or am I thinking of something else.
GP6971
(31,146 posts)GIbson
OLiver
TWlight
Hokie
(4,286 posts)We didn't have to use it though because you only had to dial the last 5 digits to make a local call until sometime in the early 60s.
We were on a party line too. My Aunt next door was on the same line. My Mom always suspected Aunt Mary was listening in on her calls. My Aunt was the neighborhood gossip.
gopiscrap
(23,758 posts)also in Texas when we were on a party line
pamdb
(1,332 posts)We had 2/4=Cherry and 4/5 and I don't remember what that one was.
Golden Raisin
(4,608 posts)and that was my first phone, in my own name, bills paid for by myself, as a young 21-year-old adult in my first apartment (NYC). I still have that landline 47 years later although now the prefix is just plain 877.
SaveOurDemocracy
(4,400 posts)If you were calling within the same exchange you just dialed last four numbers.
lapucelle
(18,252 posts)mia
(8,360 posts)Did anyone else grow up in Bethesda, Maryland?
Grammy23
(5,810 posts)20498
Only one phone in the house. Rotary dial, Black, heavy, of course. Parents discouraged any of our friends from calling after about 8 p.m. And late night calls only meant one thing. Somebody had died.
When we moved to Texas in the 60s our house had a niche in the wall in our central hallway for the phone. It had a lengthy cord so we could move about with it but not out of the hallway. I sat in the hall many a night, chatting with my best friend for as long as our parents would allow it. No princess phone in my room.
cyclonefence
(4,483 posts)is how I called my grandmother. I was speaking to the operator who said "Number, please" when I picked up the receiver. After I gave the number, she said "Thank you," and rang my grandmother's phone.
Telephone dials? What next--flying cars?
red dog 1
(27,797 posts)I remember my aunt & uncle's phone number because they had the same number for 30 years
Juniper 7-7970
I remember that they originally had a "party line" because there were no private lines available at the time.
Other prefixes in San Francisco were:
- Atwater
- Juno
- Valencia
- Mission
- Seabright
- Klondike
- Kellogg
- Ocean
- Tuxedo
- Bayview
marked50
(1,366 posts)But here's where this OP takes me. As a young child, when I was waiting for the school bus my Dad always had the radio on. There was one ad that I remember the jingle to to this day. This would be around the early 60's. In the jingle was the phone number.
"Call AD6-9105, that's AD6-9105......"
Still can't get that one out of my head.
yortsed snacilbuper
(7,939 posts)mainstreetonce
(4,178 posts)There was also Federal
yellowdogintexas
(22,252 posts)Where were you?
mainstreetonce
(4,178 posts).
TheDebbieDee
(11,119 posts)The Genealogist
(4,723 posts)There was a third central office put in a bit after they stopped using exchange names in phone numbers, but it was still called the TEmple exchange.
A the mother of a friend of mine worked for a while as an operator when she was a young lady. She said that her co-workers thought of the TUxedo numbers as being superior, as they were assigned to a nicer part of town than the UNiversity numbers.
Binkie The Clown
(7,911 posts)LisaM
(27,806 posts)They also had a phone like that, and the reception on that thing was like talking to someone a foot away.
TygrBright
(20,759 posts)It's amazing how stuff imprints on your brain when young.
I can't for the life of me remember my most recent landline number from when we lived back in MD.
amusedly,
Bright
lisa58
(5,755 posts)16877
hay rick
(7,608 posts)5525. Madison, NJ in the late 50's, early 60's.
MuseRider
(34,108 posts)We still had a party line for quite a while after we got the exchange of CR.
3catwoman3
(23,975 posts)Started out with a GL8, and later had a CLearwater4. 8 party line initially, then 4, then private.
In the greater Chicago area, there are so many phone numbers that we have to use the area code even to call someone across the street.
VOX
(22,976 posts)EXmont (Mar Vista); EXbrook (Santa Monica and Venice); GLadstone (Santa Monica, Malibu and Topanga); VErmont Culver City; HOllywood (Hollywood, duh); STate (Sherman Oaks); ORchard (Westchester); OLive (West Hollywood); FRontier (Manhattan Beach).
Tikki
(14,557 posts)Tikki
lkinwi
(1,477 posts)mpcamb
(2,870 posts)Later TRinity 6-3262 when we were forced, kicking and screaming, to join full-fledged American Life.
sinkingfeeling
(51,454 posts)lillypaddle
(9,580 posts)and there were a few others but my memory fails me.
annabanana
(52,791 posts)My childhood number.
You never forget the first one you learned...
Ohiya
(2,230 posts)I think.
crazycatlady
(4,492 posts)In fact I barely remember dialing 7 digits. I last used a landline circa 2000.
bif
(22,697 posts)Naturally.
ProfessorGAC
(65,010 posts)The numbers were 7 and 2. When i was a kid though, EVERYONE had the same 2 numbers at the beginning. In fact, there was 722, 723, 725, 726, and 729 and the 5 and 9 didn't hit until i was probably 9 or 10. So, you didn't even get all the choices for the 7-2 start.
Then we got the 7-4 series in the very early 70's.
Today, everybody in the town in live in has numbers that start 47. That's an odd set of letters. I can see GR or IS, but there are some combinations that wouldn't be much of a word. I can't think of a word that begins in HP or GS. We moved there LONG after the word thing went away.
KT2000
(20,577 posts)ramblin_dave
(1,546 posts)jmowreader
(50,557 posts)This is how an old-timey telephone exchange worked...
The fewer digits in a telephone number, the fewer of these switches they needed to install in the dial central office.
Soxfan58
(3,479 posts)Skowhegan , Maine
Number9Dream
(1,561 posts)Bet they were glad to get rid of "FU".
Chipper Chat
(9,678 posts)MElrose
GRidley
AMhearst
NOrth (I remember our number in 1956 was NOrth 2-2622)
ploppy
(2,162 posts)ADams 51526.
yellowdogintexas
(22,252 posts)How did The Phone Company come up with these names?
mac56
(17,566 posts)Then HAmilton 5-4213.
Rhiannon12866
(205,285 posts)I was pretty little, but I did know my phone number.
I also remember when my grandmother had a phone where you'd get an operator when you picked it up, like they had on Andy Griffith. My brother and I gave that phone a very wide berth...
ashling
(25,771 posts)My brother and I were baby sitted by the Hawkins (teens) girls down the street. When we wanted to go over there my brother would pick up the phone and gurgle and the operator would connect the Hawkins'.