Posted on 01/16/2021 6:35:26 AM PST by Alas Babylon!
Rotary dial phone, there’s an app for that.
“Davis 2409.”
In Maryland I remember WArfield-7 (927) and UNion-4 (864) exchanges, but they were for 7-digit numbers.
Our first “illegal” extension was an old 1940’s era phone my brother trashpicked.
It’s actually from NYC.
Pennsylvania Hotel that was on 7th St.
Ours was 4253. Our neighbors across the road was 4357. We called them the most. Fortunately they weren’t on the same party line as us so you could just dial the 4 numbers.
The houses on our same party line were on the same side of the road. If you wanted someone on our party line you dialed some other one or two digit number(?) then their 4 digit number and hung up. Your phones would both ring. When they picked up both would stop ringing and you had to quickly pick up before they hung up.
We were served by a small local telephone company that had three towns and their rural customers all together. So you could call local 25 miles away to the west. But more than a mile or two east or north was long distance.
Long distance was expensive and only used for very important or vital messages.
There was one public phone in the town (we lived in the country). You could call a local number and it would ring the number. You could hear the called party but they could not hear you until you deposited a dime. So of course we’d call when we were needing to be picked up and they knew ahead of time that we’d be calling so never actually put the dime into the slot.
I saw a video where they put three modern-day teenagers in a room with a dial telephone and they couldn’t figure out what it was or how to operate it.
To be honest, I was a little skeptical.
I vaguely remember when the phone numbers at Logan Airport in Boston (where my father worked) all started out with “LO-7” followed by a four digit number. The actual prefix dialed was “567” but originally the “LO” stood for Logan.
How many kids these days would even be able to work a old dial phone?
Ya, the early ones started by the flywheel. And you had to open the decompression valves like you said.
But to let that GD magneto get ahold of you..MAN! Just about the time you could get away it would nail you again.
NEVER...mess around by the spark plugs when its running. EVER.
This is true. I asked a young school teacher to count out change one time.
Couldnt do it. Did not even have any idea what the hell I was talking about.
That’s a phone number.
Ahhh. Mine was Edgewater 5, followed by four digits. I'll remember it all my life.
Back in the 60’s, we would occasionally get wrong numbers. They would apologize, hang up and call right back - insisting they had dialed the correct number, usually one digit off. You can imagine the fun - “I KNOW I DIALED THE RIGHT NUMBER!” after about three tries.
Finally, a phone tech figured it out. At busy times, the local system brought older equipment on line, and these racks would sometimes mess up on certain numbers. They just changed our number.
That would be funny, if it weren't so sad.
In order to try to keep sharp, I used to calculate my change in my head when I gave the cashier my money. Often, after using the "Amount Tendered" button and have the machine calculate the change they'd look at me and say, "How'd you do that"?
Another thing I used to do would be to make a comment about a historical event based on the amount due. For example, if the amount came to $19.41 I'd say, "That was a bad year". One day it came to $17.76 and I said, "That was good year". The cashier asked me what I meant, and I said, "You know, 1776; what happened in 1776; it was a good year". "Why is that?" she asked again and said she wasn't good with dates. I told her to never mind but asked her not to ever vote.
The exchanges we used often enough for me to remember were GEneral, HAmilton, LIncoln, MYrtle, and OVerbrook. Using the letters started fading away for me in the early 70’s. I sometimes still give my present number that way to mess with kids.
I do both of those. I sometimes wait until they put the amount tendered in before fishing out the 3 cents needed to get a quarter back. The younger they are the less likely they are to understand what I did.
We referred to it as either “Edgewater” or “Eee Dee,” but the digit “5” always followed, then 4 more digits.
I do that all the time. However, I often disappoint myself because I cannot think of anything that happened 'that' year.
It would have to be one of these:
(notice the buttons)
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