Was going through a box of old papers and found a University City High School paper from June 8, 1926. This was on the back.
You can tell it's in a big city because the phone number has a prefix and four digits. Around here the ad would have said something like "Phone 263".
When I was a kid, we had a 4 number dial and party line. You answered if it was your long/short ring, but could pick up and listen to anyone if desired.
Okay what flavor is Honeymoon, and I hope it has nothing with bitumen tar? Maybe like a noice rocky road???
I don't know. St. Louis Dairy apparently ended up as part of Sealtest, and I don't find a honeymoon ice cream flavor.
up til 59 my folks ph # was one long-2 shorts...or what sounded like one long-2 shorts. Often you could tell the caller by the cadence of the ring...early caller ID
Bill
As a kid, our party line ring was two longs and two shorts...it is interesting now to think back that the phone would ring several times during the day.....but the only one that seemed to register in our ears and head was the two longs and two shorts. Since it was a very small town, the operator knew us and our family.....we definately did not want my father and mother to know that we had knowingly eavesdropped....things got real ugly at that point.
Boy, there sure a lot of ole geezers here. I guess I'm one of them also. We were one long and two shorts up until about 1950 or so. Then we moved to town and soon after got a private line. Still, the numbers were only four or five digits. My grandmothers was 8164, and ours was 3-6267. In college, mine was RIverside 3-4293.
Does anyone remember the "otherside" of a party line? IIRC, you couldn't listen to them, but you couldn't use the phone either.
We could listen and also join in the conversation, but could not dial out till the call had ended and all partys hung up. That would be on an old rotary phone.
When I was growing up on the farm our party line number was 016-R1 which was number 16, ring once. I recall 2 rings and 3 rings on our line so assume they were R2 and R3. After moving to town we still had a party line until the late 50's. All of the calls in both locations had to go through an operator, we didn't have dial service until sometime in the early '60s.
Ours in the country was "Fleetwood-62894. How many remember the first digits as a name, not number? Two short rings. Yes, there were 6 on the party line. I often could hear my grandmother down the line listenning in on my conversations with friends. While talking, we'd often mention "somebody listenning in" and could hear the other receiver hang up.
We went from TErryhill 3-6187 to YOrktown 5-0304.
I was the manager of the telephone company in Richmond, Indiana in 1964. Unfortunetly we had a disatrous fire which burned the interior of the central switching office completely. Inorder to maintain some modicom of service while we spent the next eight months rebuilding the switching etc. we had to put every customer on a manual common battery 10 person line with coded ringing. Quite an awakeing for many who had never experienced party lines or coded ringing. We had hundreds of operators sitting at old manual swithboards inorder to handle the calls. I was not the most popular person in Richmond at the time but I sure enjoyed going back last summer during the Centenial and looking things over.
Bill Rigdon
'25 Fordor
This is the old telephone that I grew up with, and it still works between my Barn and the House. It is a Western Electric, and is still original down to the wire covering for the ear piece. Our ring was "5", and the first long distance call I ever made was on this phone. We used fence wire in the main to run to other homes and on into town, and of course the quality was poor, but it was a Telephone. During the War it was used by the folks in the area (we had the only telephone for miles) for men in the Services to call home, they would usually write and set up a time to call, sometimes they would call late at night and we would have to go and get whomever it was for, but times were different then. The small town of Bay City was the terminus, and there was a Western Union Office there, just a very small hole in the wall with a female Operator that all us young bucks would bother late at night when business was slow, but she encouraged it. When we finally got a "better" system, we used this very telephone to call up fish from the creek, another story. I remember for some reason hearing my Grandfather tell all the eaves droppers to "hang up, I'm fixing to talk about bulls", and you could hear the clicks as the ladies would hang up. To this day, it had better be a death in the family to call me after about 9 at night, we were careful and miserly about the use of the phone, a habit I have to this day.
"Pennsylvania-six-five thousand"
That one goes back quite a way.
Our home phone was/is CEdar5-2721. It is still the resort number, but with a new area code. As a kid, I could dial 4 digits to call around town, but long distance, even 8 miles to Mount Shasta was by an operator. I forget when that changed, but I must have been in grade school at the time (early 60s).
T'
David D.
Dick, your dad went to Uni.High ?? My dad went there also !!!
George n L.A.
I still have our old family wood telephone in my office. Is inoperable, but a good reminder of the old days. Our local operator closed down the "board" at 7:00PM, so no long distance calls. Also, during the day you could call the operator and she could tell you who was home or not or where they were. Great "information" operator!!
Gerald Cornelius
Watertown, South Dakota
George, my Dad lived on Wayne Avenue. I think he was class of 1926.
Seeing Grady's phone, I had to take a picture of my front hall. That's where Grandma's phone was when I was a kiddo, so when I moved to the farm twenty-five years ago I put this phone in the same spot. The old one went when the dial system arrived about 1960. I had a line from this phone to one in the barn until a high school kid I hired for some yard work dug through the underground wire.
Steve -- The push button light switches in the newel post are WAY cool! I haven't seen any of those in many moons.
Dick,, my Dad was a grad in '41 or '42.
George n L.A.
We had a crank phone in the small town (93 people) that I was raised in until we moved to a bigger town (1200 people) in '58. I think our ring was three longs and two shorts. Our new phone still had to go through an operator until the early '60's. I still ain't got the hang of the cell phone! Dave
Couple are sitting in the living room reading the newspaper. The phone rings and the husband gets up to answer it. Picks up the phone, listens briefly, says, "Yep, sure is," and hangs up. "Who was that?" asks the wife. "I dunno. Some gal who said it was a long distance from New York."
Pennsylvania 6-5000 was the phone # of Frank Daily's Meadowbrook where all the big bands played in the '30s and 40's. John
No, John - it's the number to hotel Pennsylvania in New York. It's said to be New York's oldest telephone number - in continous use since 1919, when the hotel was built.
From Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEnnsylvania_6-5000
"PEnnsylvania 6-5000 is said to be the oldest continuing phone number in New York City. It belongs to the Hotel Pennsylvania and has been in continuous use since 1919.[1] The telephone number is based on the old telephone exchange name system. The first two letters "PE" in PE6-5000 stand for the rotary dial numbers 7 and 3, making the number (with Manhattan's area code) +1 (212) 736-5000.
Many big band names played in the Hotel Pennsylvania's Cafe Rouge Ballroom, including the Glenn Miller Orchestra; the phone number became the inspiration for the Glenn Miller Top 5 hit song of the same name, written by Jerry Gray and Carl Sigman"