I wish they explained why, in the old days, people would call the operator and saw things like “Klondike 558”, etc. Any Freeper know why?
I know they used to use letters instead of numbers, such as OV23636.
I wonder what people would think of party lines today?
Our tone was two longs and a short.
That would have been a number on the Klondike exchange. There were no universal numbers at the time.
It was considered an easier way to remember numbers. KL was 55, then a third number, then a dash, then four numbers. KLondike 3-3413 is 555-3413.
The first two letters in an exchange equated to the first two numbers of the exchange number. Early on, if you were in the same exchange, you only needed to dial the last five digits, like you do today in an office.
Each telephone office exchange had a two digit number assigned, and a nemonic was created to help remember it. Where I grew up, my exchange was “Prescott 2,” with the first two letters PR equating to “77.” Thus my phone number started with “772.” This is why there are letters on your phone dial.
Apparently, the phone company figured people could remember a name and five digits easier than remembering seven digits.
“Later exchanges consisted of one to several hundred plug boards staffed by telephone operators. Each operator sat in front of a vertical panel containing banks of ¼-inch tip-ring-sleeve (3-conductor) jacks, each of which was the local termination of a subscriber’s telephone line. In front of the jack panel lay a horizontal panel containing two rows of patch cords, each pair connected to a cord circuit. When a calling party lifted the receiver, a signal lamp near the jack would light. The operator would plug one of the cords (the “answering cord”) into the subscriber’s jack and switch her headset into the circuit to ask, “Number, please?” Depending upon the answer, the operator might plug the other cord of the pair (the “ringing cord”) into the called party’s local jack and start the ringing cycle, or plug into a trunk circuit to start what might be a long distance call handled by subsequent operators in another bank of boards or in another building miles away. In 1918, the average time to complete the connection for a long-distance call was 15 minutes.[8] In the ringdown method, the originating operator called another intermediate operator who would call the called subscriber, or passed it on to another intermediate operator.[9] This chain of intermediate operators could complete the call only if intermediate trunk lines were available between all the centers at the same time. In 1943 when military calls had priority, a cross-country US call might take as long as 2 hours to request and schedule in cities that used manual switchboards for toll calls.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_exchange
“things like “Klondike 558”
Yes, they should have explained that a bit better.
Back in the day, the “exchange” part of the phone number was a word.
I think it started with just the word, or actually the first 2 letters of the word, and then the actual number, which I think at the very beginning was probably more like an extension. I mean, remember “party lines”? Where a bunch of houses would share one actual line and if your neighbors were talking, you couldn’t be.
I actually visited with some friends in their upstate NY summer house which as late as the early 90s still had a party line.
Soon enough when they needed more numbers they added a third number to the exchange part.
I think KLondike was a real exchange, at least in NYC so it would make sense it would have gotten used for TV stuff since so much early TV was shot in NY.
Mine was ORegon. OR7-xxxx.
The most famous one of these is probably BUtterfield 8 from the melodramatic Liz Taylor movie of the 1960s.
I remember my brother telling me that my parents were very upset they had to give up some classy exchange at one point, when they moved, but I can’t remember what that was. ORegon was low rent, for some reason!
Others I can remember are:
JUdson
GRamercy (AH! that was probably the one they lost out on. I knew a lot of kids with that exchange, we were in the Gramercy Park neighborhood, dontcha know)
HUdson
It was kind of cool and then it was just gone.
Oh well, now we have cool internet nicknames like “jocon307” and “an american in turkiye”, so we’ll have to be happy with those....for now!
Most towns had one or more prefixes comprised of two numbers. The town I lived in started with 874 which corresponds to TRI and these letters were associated with the word TRInity. It was a short hand way of identifying the initial part of the phone number.