This month I got to thinking about something else that no longer exists: telephone exchange names. Famous ones like Manhattan's "BUtterfield 8", the title of a John O'Hara novel and subsequent movie starring Elizabeth Taylor. Glenn Miller's tune "PEnnsylvania 6-5000" was the number of the Pennsylvania Hotel; Bugs Bunny spoofed it in the cartoon "TRansylvania 6-5000." The Flintstones were almost named the Gladstones after an exchange in the Pacific Palisades section of Los Angeles. And who can forget MUrray Hill, the Ricardos' exchange on "I Love Lucy."
Others were fictitious, like the Marvelettes' "BEechwood 4-5789" (Columbus, Ohio did have BEachwood.) There was TIdewater 4-10-0-9, a non-existent Norfolk, Virginia number Chuck Berry calls in the song "Promised Land", although dialing 844 might have given the exact time, as it did in other cities. No actual exchange corresponded to the Partridge Family song "ECho Valley 2-6809", as far as we know; yes, there's a web-site that attempts to collect ALL the exchange names ever used, called the Telephone EXchange Number Project. A long-forgotten 50s private eye show called "COronado 9" was the exchange of Rod Cameron's character in San Diego, but it wasn't real. There is a suburb called Coronado, but they had HEnley 3 and HEmpstead 5.
I grew up north of Boston, and ours was SPring; neighboring towns had PIoneer, WAlker, TUcker, and JEfferson. Boston itself had dozens, a famous one immortalized in a radio jingle: "How many cookies did Andrew eat? Andrew ate eight thousand." For some reason this is remembered as an all-night drug store, but it was actually a carpet-cleaning company Adams & Swett, which still exists. "How do you keep your carpets neat? Call ANdrew 8-8000."
In the North Country, Massena had ROckwell, Potsdam = COlony, Morristown = DRake, Heuvelton = FIreside, Hammond and Madrid = DAvenport, Waddington and Norfolk = EVergreen, Norwood = FLeetwood. Canton's FT6 didn't stand for anything, what was called a "selected letter" exchange. Need to call Watertown? That would be SU2 or SU8, which stood for SUnset. Many communities, including Ogdensburg and Gouverneur, never had an exchange name, and for the reason, we need to know a little about the history of telephone numbers and how placing a call changed through the years.
Many people today think exchange names were just an easy way to remember numbers, but that was only part of it. An "exchange" was actually your local telephone company office or "central", where the switchboard operators and switching equipment were located. In the beginning, you jiggled the receiver hook to get the operator's attention, then told her the town and name of the person you wanted to call. As subscribers increased, they were assigned a number consisting of 1 to 4 digits. A letter following the number meant a party line, usually a W, J, M, or R.
But as time went on, it became clear the only efficient way to handle the enormous increase in phone usage was Direct Dialing, where the customer did all the work. To accomplish this, local numbers had to be standardized to 4 digits, then the locality pinpointed with an "exchange number", originally 2 digits long. This began around 1928. Bigger cities soon expanded to 3 digits, and eventually everyone did. Identifying them with a mnemonic word grew out of the habit of telling the operator the town you wanted; where possible, the name of the town became the exchange name. In cities large enough to have more than one exchange office, they were often identified by the street they were on, which is why many exchange names sounded like street names.
But the number of phone numbers that could be assigned with words was limited: 55, 57, 95, and 97 had no easy letter match. 1 was not used as an exchange number, not because it would one day indicate a long distance, but because of "dial-pull." With a rotary dial, the phone company equipment recognized a number by the number of "pulses" or interruptions in the current ("dial tone") it detected. Dialing a 3 for example interrupted the dial-tone 3 times: click-click-click. In fact, if your rotary dial ever stopped working, you could reach your party by tapping the cradle button where the receiver rested. 0 came after 9, and not before 1, because 0 was actually 10 clicks. But when you first picked up the receiver, a slight jiggle might make the switcher think you had dialed a 1 when you hadn't, so all leading 1's were considered "noise" and ignored.
Also, 0 could not be used, being reserved for contacting the operator. Some phones did have the letter Z with the 0: this stood for Zenith, which was used for toll-free numbers before 800 became standard. Interesting use of 0: remember the "Honeymooners" episode where Alice gets a baby-sitting job & Ralph thinks she's fooling around on him? ("Gee, I didn't know Davy Crockett was so FAT!") The phone number was originally BEnsonhurst 3-7741, but when this was found to be a working number, they went back and dubbed in BEnsonhurst 0, which wasn't.
Thus, by eliminating exchange names, All Digit Dialing freed up more possible number combinations, and this was the sole reason it was phased in, beginning in Wichita Falls, Texas in 1958. No, people didn't like it; one famous sign read "Give Me LIberty, or Take Out the Damn Phone!" (That's LIberty with a capital L-I.) Noted academic S. I. Hayakawa formed the Anti Digit Dialing League, and protest songs were recorded by Stan Freberg and Allan Sherman. But Ma Bell really didn't have a choice. They needed more numbers!
Ogdensburg didn't convert to Direct Dialing until after the All Digit switch had begun, so 393 wasn't assigned an exchange name. The phone company had issued a list of suggested names several years earlier, so the Maple City's exchange could have been EXeter 3, which sounds pretty cool to me. By this time, the North American Numbering Plan was being established to take operators out of the long distance dialing loop, and the whole process was repeated, this time with area codes. Big cities got numbers with low dial-pull, like 212 for New York and 312 for Chicago. Till next time, think about this: how come when you dial a wrong number, it's never busy?....and rock on!
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