(NON-POLITICAL) PARTY LINES AND OTHER TELEPHONIC CURIOSITIES PART 2

YESTERDAY’S PHONE ACTIVITIES WERE local calls with the likes of Lum and Abner and Fibber McGee and Molly. Telephone operators played important (if sometimes unspoken) roles. Today in Part 2 we dial SiriusXm “RadioClassics” long-distance. (“What’s a ‘dial,’ Grandpa?”)

Long-distance Calls. Prior to the 1950s, calling long-distance was a tag-team operation of specialized telephone operators at either end: “Chicago, I have New York…” 

In some countries, it involved the caller going to a central office, filling out a paper slip, maybe paying in advance, then waiting for the connection. 

Wikipedia notes, “On November 10, 1951, the first direct dial long-distance telephone call in North America was placed from Mayor M. Leslie Denning of Englewood, New Jersey to Mayor Frank Osborne of Alameda, California via AT&T’s Bell System. The ten digit call (seven digits plus a three-digit area code) was connected automatically within 18 seconds.”

Just the Phone Calls, Ma’am. Wikipedia shares an extended example of pre-direct-dial complexity occurring on the radio series Dragnet: “Sgt. Joe Friday (Jack Webb) places an operator assisted person-to-person long-distance call to a number reached via a manual switchboard in Fountain Green, Utah, a town of several hundred people served by an independent telephone company. In the call, Friday calls a long-distance operator in Los Angeles and gives the name and number of the called party. The operator then calls a rate-and-route operator, who responds that the call should be routed through Salt Lake City and Mount Pleasant, Utah, and that the rate-step for the call is 140. The long-distance operator would mark her ticket with that rate-step, and could use it to quote the rate from her rate table, in terms of the first three minutes and each additional minute, if the caller requested the toll.”

Dragnet’s Sgt. Joe Friday. Image from ebay.com.

Wikipedia continues, “The Los Angeles long-distance operator then plugs into a direct trunk to the Salt Lake City inward operator and asks her for Mount Pleasant; the Salt Lake operator rings Mount Pleasant, where the Los Angeles operator asks for Fountain Green. The Mount Pleasant operator rings Fountain Green, and the Los Angeles operator gives the Fountain Green operator the number and name of the called party in Fountain Green. The Fountain Green operator rings the number, 14R2, a party line where a specific ringing pattern summons the second subscriber on the shared line. A man answers; the Los Angeles operator asks for the called party and states that Los Angeles is calling.”

Along similar lines, there was an entire episode of another radio drama that focused on telephoning a doctor in South America from the U.S. Given that it was an international call, the process was even more involved.

Today, of course, all we need is the country code and number.

Running for the Phone. Old radio shows (and movies as well) were replete with people “running to answer the phone.” Typical of the era, there was one telephone per home, always placed on a dedicated phone table at the foot of the stairs. A rooming house had a single wall phone for all its residents. And, of course, there were always phone booths. “What’s a ‘phone booth,’ Grandpa?”

Ha. Today we’d be running for the phone only if we’d forgotten to swap it from one pocket to the other. ds

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2024