It wasn’t that many years ago, in the age of the AT&T
monopoly and rotary telephones, that long distance calls were a kind of a big
deal, and were placed much differently than they are today. In those days, we knew nothing about area
codes, 1+ dialing, and free long distance.
Larger cities had seven-digit phone numbers, and smaller towns probably
had four digit phone numbers. Some towns
that were served by independent phone companies may have had three digit or
five digit phone numbers.
Even though larger cities had seven digit phone numbers, the
prefix was usually a name followed by the third number of the seven-number
series. In Wichita, for example, your
phone number might be Whitehall 3-something.
Other prefixes might have been Murray, Temple, Amherst, Forest, Jackson,
Parkview, or others. The idea was that
you dial the first two letters of the prefix, then the rest of the
numbers. So, Whitehall 3-4221 (KAKE TV’s
phone number, which they still have, by the way), would be 943-4221.
And long distance? That cost ten cents a minute or more,
depending on the distance. The farther away,
the more it cost. One never dialed long
distance in Kansas until the mid to late 1960’s. If you wanted to make a long distance call,
you dialed the Operator and placed the call through (usually) her. You told her your own number, told her the
number you wanted to reach, told her whether station to station or person to person
or collect, and had her dial the number for you. Station to station was where the time started
whenever the other phone answered, regardless of who answered it. Person to person was that you asked for a
specific person and the time wouldn’t start charging until that person came to
the phone. Collect was reversing the
charges, and the person answering agree to it before you could talk.
Sometimes, you could tell the operator you wanted to talk to,
say, Mike’s Corner Grocery in Engleville, Kansas, and she would call the local
operator in Engleville and get the connection for you. If the phone went unanswered, the operator often
would volunteer to place the call for you later and ring you back when the
other party was on the line.
Most towns of any size at all had a local Bell System (or
independent phone company) office. That
office had central office switching equipment in it and operators stationed
there 24/7. Sometimes operators did
double duty by taking emergency calls for fires, calling the volunteer firemen’s
phones, and activating the local town fire whistle.
There were party lines, especially in the country. That meant that upwards of eight phones were
attached to the same pair of wires, and if one phone was busy, none of the
others could make a call. But they could
listen in on the conversation, and often did.
Rings were different on the different phones. Four of the phones would ring at one time. The rings would be different. One might be one long and one short. One might be two shorts. One might be one long. One might be a long and two shorts. And so on.
You knew which ring was yours, and you were only supposed to answer your
ring. The other four phones on the line rang
when the ring voltage came down the other wire of the pair, and they had
similar rings to the first four. But all
eight phones could hear a conversation that was taking place.
In some of the rougher countryside, phone lines sometimes
consisted of the wires of a fence as it ran along a section line or road. Or it consisted of a single wire and used the
earth ground as the return path. Neither
of those options did much for reliability, but most of the time it worked, sort
of.
Of course, this was in the 1950’s and early 1960’s that I
recall. Before that were hand crank
phones, operators placing even local calls for people, and other such that I
don’t well recall as I wasn’t living then. All in all a very inefficient, but viable
service for many years. More in the next
blog.
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