Old Phone System Mnemonics?

8,446 Views | 19 Replies | Last: 6 yr ago by Aggie63
HollywoodBQ
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AG
Does anybody have a listing of old phone number Mnemonics or know where I could find such a list.

The most obvious example is Pennsylvania 6-5000
But I was reading something earlier and the phone number was CHarleston x-xxxx

When I was 17 in High School and working in the Eckerd Drugs Pharmacy in Hewitt, TX, where the phone exchange was "The Number of the Beast", we would often get old people who had printed on their checks NO6-xxxx instead of 666-xxxx.

So... I was wondering how they came up with the names - Pennsylvania, Charleston, etc.
BQ78
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AG
I bet the answer is on Wikipedia or the web somewhere, I don't know but my old exchange at home was:

Broadway or BR for 27.
HollywoodBQ
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AG
I scoured the internet for a few minutes. Given the range of talent on TexAgs, I figured somebody here would know something about it.

When I lived in a small town in Alaska in the mid-70s, everybody had the same exchange so you only needed to know the last 4 digits of somebody's phone number.

When I lived in a small town in Saudi Arabia in the late 70s, everybody had a 5 digit phone number and about 4 houses shared a single party line. So, sometimes you had to deal with people already on the phone if you wanted to make a call.

It's only been within the past 5 years that places like San Jose, California finally got an overlaid area code and now everyone has to dial 10 digits to place calls.

I assume there must be a list out there of recommended words to use for various prefixes.
BQ78
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AG
Here's what I found, Hollywood I think the third link is as close as you'll get to a definitive list:

http://mentalfloss.com/article/61116/why-did-old-phone-numbers-start-letters

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_exchange_names

http://ourwebhome.com/TENP/TENproject.html

and for the TLDR crowd, here is a YouTube:



I certainly remember the days of party lines and it was hell sharing a party line with the popular pretty high school girl. Sometimes you just had to interrupt their inane banter to make an important call. I think if you didn't have the guts to do that you could dial O for the operator and get her to do the dirty work or find out if the other call really was important.

As you probably know Hollywood film phone numbers usually start with 555, an exchange never really used by the phone companies. So in most old movies when they gave a phone number it was Klondike 5-XXXX or Quincy5-XXXX (since there was no Q on the rotary dial)

ABATTBQ87
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AG
When we would call my grandparents in Mineral Wells we would dial FA5-2274
FearNoWeevil
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AG
El Campo was Lincoln for "54". 543-XXXX was LI 3-XXXX.
Smokedraw01
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I have no clue what any of you are talking about except for what a party line is.
Rabid Cougar
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AG
In Cameron in the late 60's and most of the 70's we just had to dial the four digits 3572 AND the area code for half the state was 817. so when I called my friends i just dialed four digits. When I called my grandparents in Temple I had to dial 722-1356. I don't remember when but sometime in there i had to start dialing 5 digits 7-3572. Then the whole prefix. BTW, my parents telephone number has been the same since 1967. I know my grandparents were the same from the 50's until the died in the late 90's early 2000s
Their Number was Enterprise-XXXX at one time.
commando2004
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AG
HollywoodBQ said:

I assume there must be a list out there of recommended words to use for various prefixes.
Some of them would have had very limited options:

  • 57 = KRypton
  • 99 = XYlophone
HollywoodBQ
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AG
I finally got the time to watch that video. Very interesting. One of the parts that I found most interesting is that this video apparently from 1961 makes reference to mobile phones in cars and something called a "Bell Boy" pager. I had no idea that those things were already envisioned in 1961.

In other research, I found this explanation about the 3 letter and 4 number combinations versus the 2 letter and 5 number combinations.

Quote:

Mnemonic rules were in use in London and Paris until mid-1960s. At first Americans adopted the LLL-NNNN format (three letters, four numerals). After becoming aware that it was running out of words beginning with the needed three letters, New York introduced the LLN-NNNN format in 1930 with all the other cities following suit in 1947-48.

HollywoodBQ
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AG
Here's another page with some interesting information:
Quote:

From 1892 to 1921, one would have placed a call by telling the operator the name of the exchange, followed by the callee's specific number. For example, present day (773) 525-0421 would have been Lake View 421. Apologies to whomever currently has that number. In 1921, this was changed to a 3 letter 4 digit system. Our example number becomes LAK-0421. This was cut back to 2 letter -5 digit (2L-5D) in 1948, lasting officially until 1977. Area codes were introduced in 1947, however, the issue does not become confusing in Chicago until 1996. Our number in 1948 became (312) LA5-0421. 2L-5D is the variety that remainsif you look hard enough.
It looks like there is a project to try to consolidate old mnemonic names into a master list.
Telephone EXchange Name Project
TRD-Ferguson
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AG
In South Houston ours was HU for Hudson. HU2-1224.
Demosthenes81
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AG
FearNoWeevil said:

El Campo was Lincoln for "54". 543-XXXX was LI 3-XXXX.
Hah, another Ricebird here. I remember Lincoln3 very well along with phones that were hard wired into the wall.
commando2004
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AG
Related:

insulator_king
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AG
BR-549
Restco
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As a first grader in the early 1950s my parents made sure I memorized our phone number. We lived on a farm in south Texas and the service was a party line. The phone did not have a dial. You picked up the receiver and an operator asked, "Number please?" Our number was: 1455 J3. Eventually we were upgraded to a dial phone in the FLeetwood exchange.
Ayto Siks
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My dad retired from Southwestern Bell a long time ago. I called him to ask about the old numbering system and heard an unexpected youthful excitement.

The prefixes he remembers are:

TW = twinbrook
RA = randolph
YU = Yukon
KL = Klein
PE = pershing
TE = terminal

He also told me that a party line could either be 4 or 8 homes, and each home had a unique ring (combo of long and short rings) so each house knew if the incoming call was for them. This is all news to me.

Edit to add: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_exchange_names
HollywoodBQ
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AG
Thanks for the link to the list of Exchange Names. That was essentially what I was after when I started this thread. Wound up learning a whole lot more than what I expected.

Glad you got to extract those memories from your dad. I just spent 3 weeks in Texas and got to spend a lot of time with my 81 year old father and I heard at least two or three new stories that I'd never heard before. Any time you can get those old memories flowing is priceless.

Quote:

AT&T's recommended list of central office names in 1955, sorted by the three-digit office code, where x can be any digit.

Now, I'm going to have to ask my mom if she remembers using "YUkon" as part of her phone number when she was a kid.
JR69
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AG
My grandparents (both sets) lived in Bartlesville, Oklahoma all my life. Their exchange was ED for Edison. My maternal grandparents number was ED3-01xx, but I can remember (vaguely) before the exchanges, when my dad worked for Philips there, my mother calling her mother by telling the operator "01xx please" and calling my dad at work by telling the operator "Philips xxxx please". Later, when I was a kid in Ft Worth during the '50s, our exchange was PE for Pershing.
HollywoodBQ
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AG
Interesting. With respect to Phillips having its own Exchange, two employers I worked for in Austin in the 90s had their own Exchange so I'm sure this was relatively common for large businesses.
512-239-xxxx was the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission (now TCEQ)
512-728-xxxx was Dell (later they added more exchanges)

Obviously back in the era you're talking about, the Phillips number would have resulted in something that would have started with 74xxxxx. So, I assume they would have to have worked with the phone company to get what amounted to a vanity number for their exchange - 74xxxxx. I wonder how many other large businesses did this.
Aggie63
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AG
Growing up in College Station in the 50's our number was 45699. No prefix. I found an ice pick in my grandfathers things . On the wooden handle was printed "Stephenville Ice Company. Phone # 6."

Things were more simple then, don't you think?
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