roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu (Roy Smith) (05/09/91)
Yesterday I found a fragment of a letterhead or invoice blank
from a business my grandfather owned once. The telephone number is
listed as "9305-R" (I'm not sure of the digits, but the -R is right).
To put this in context, the place was undoubtedly Norwich,
Connecticut, and the year was probably around 1940 or so.
I assume the -R means it's the ring side of a party line, but
it seems odd to me that a business would list that as part of their
phone number (this was a small business, just my grandfather with a
truck he owned, maybe one other partner, and it's likely it was his
home phone number). Didn't each party on a party line get assigned a
different last digit? If not, how does one dial a phone number like
"9305-R"; do you have to ask the operator to connect you? I suppose
it's likely that at this time, all calls were completed manually, so
that may not have been anything out of the ordinary.
Roy Smith, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016
roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu -OR- {att,cmcl2,rutgers,hombre}!phri!roy
[Moderator's Note: Prior to automatic switching, a letter on the end
indicated one leg of a party line. After automation started, the
letter was dropped and the seventh digit was the deciding factor. He
probably had a party line with the other 'party' being himself at his
residence. PAT]Robert_Swenson.OSBU_North@xerox.com (05/16/91)
Talking about old phone numbers; party line phones, etc., when I was growing up in Berkeley, Calif, before and during WWII my home phone was Berkeley 1199-W. The phone of a house across the street was Berkeley 1199-J. Some frends of ours in Albany, the next city to the north, had Berkeley 1199. The Berkeley exchanges (Berkeley, Thornwall, Ashburry) were manual until quite late in time - about 1946 when they were converted to dial. They were almost the last area to go dial in the San Francisco area, always excluding the famous exchange in San Francisco, China. The operators in China knew each resident of Chinatown by name, calls could be placed within the exchange by name, and the operators could frequently track someone down if he/she was away from home. All gone now. During WWII the Berkeley area manual exchanges became very overloaded. New phone connections were almost impossible to get, but they could be gotten in extreme cases. All phone numbers were four digit except that during the war, some numbers in Ashburry were five digit. The young woman who became my wife had a five digit phone number. Exchange names: Berkeley became BErkeley became BErkeley-7 became BE7 became 237. (Our friends in Albany had been moved to LAndscape-5 with the same four digits.) Along the way our part of town became LAndscape-6 which became LA6 which became 526 except for pay phones which became CEdar-7. Note this is the same numbers as BErkeley-7 (237). Bob Swenson [Moderator's Note: Ah yes, speaking of China, have you ever seen the famous photograph which AT&T used in their centennial history book a few years ago? It was full of fascinating old photographs, but my favorite was the one entitled 'San Fransisco, China Exchange'. From right after the start of this century, it showed an old-fashioned switchboard with a Chinese woman operator, and a young girl playing on the floor next to her. PAT]