Twinbrook-1, 0112, please…

As many may know, Mrs. Pinetar and I have moved into my grandparent’s home. My grandpa was a lifetime employee of “The Phone Company”, as it was known. He did allright, especially in the depression when they only cut him back a few days a week.

Most don’t know it but phones didn’t always have dials. From 1876 to about 1915, dials were pretty much unheard of. You picked up your phone and instead of hearing dial tone, you heard a live person’s voice saying, “number please”. This was the operator. She would literally plug your pair of wires (it was a called “a pair”) into the exchange of the party you were calling. I say “she”, because men were first given the job of phone operator but it was soon discovered that women were better at being patient and dealing with the public. This was probably, along with school teacher, the first job/career that a woman could have to support herself in a non-agrarian society.

Anyway, that “number please” drill was the way it worked for years. Then, in North Jersey, in the 1950’s (earlier in bigger cities), all the phones were converted to dials and automatic switches. Local calls would then be handled at a local automatic switch, and you would only need the operator to dial long distance. My mother’s first job was part of this conversion project just before she got married in 1954. As a result, my grandfather and mother got to cherry pick the good numbers. My parents first phone number at their first married apartment in Ridgewood, NJ was 444-4444.

This lasted until the top AT&T guy in NJ realized that HE wanted this number and so he took it. And really, why do you suppose that Ridgewood, with it’s stockbrokers and bank presidents and higher-ups at AT&T got their exchange numbered “444″ in the first place? (And this cherry-picking of numbers is not limited to phone numbers. My wife’s mother worked at Social Security and as a result, my wife’s social security number is so round that it looks phony.) (And if you’ve ever dialed a phone, you know that low numbers are easy and don’t take very long to spin out, do 444 is far superior to 999.  With today’s push buttons, all numbers are equal.)

The number my grandfather chose is also a plum (I have photoshopped it so it is different than the photo) and I have it now as my number. I really get a kick out of the fact that not only do I have his old number, but he hand-picked the number for its ease of memorization. I think of he and my grandma every time I dial it or give it out. My parents’ number in the next town over is also a hand-picked job and is very memorable for those of you who know it.

The other thing that is gone now from phone-dom is the party line. In the days of stringing the wire, they saved on running pairs of wire from each house to the local exchange by having several houses share a pair of wires. This was the party line. Each house would have a different ring and you weren’t supposed to pick up the other guy’s ring but you could lift the receiver and just listen in on OPB (other people’s business) and these people were usually your neighbors, making it all the more tempting.

Most party lines were gone by the 1960’s but not the one I grew up with. My parents number was a party line with a little old couple in the same town. We even knew the house. Now understand that we had 5 children and my dad ran the town soccer and baseball recreation stuff for years and logged hours on the phone every night of the 1970’s it seemed. We absolutely melted that phone line. Those poor people! ANY time they picked up their phone, we’d be yacking on it. Yet they never complained. We never even heard them! The party line was taken out finally in the early 1980’s (1980 I think). Do you know that we only picked up that phone and heard the “other” guys talking, really maybe only about once every 5 years on average! Maybe they listened in? Who knows? Maybe it was great entertainment (but I doubt it).

Anyway, the point of this story is that I was noticing the phone in the cellar that my grandfather had put in there so my grandmother could get calls while working on crafts down there. The center of the dial has the old exchange on it. That’s right, the 3 digits that come between the area code and your number are known as “the exchange”, and they used to indicate what particular operator and switching station that pair of wires fed in to.

Originally, they all had names, or mnemonics, that made it easier to remember the 3 digits. The one I grew up with, “891″, was originally, Twinbrook-1. The “T” was the first number dialed, or “8″. The “W”, was the second number “9″ and the “1″ after it, was the 1, so ‘891′. If you listen to old TV shows like “I Love Lucy”, you’ll hear her get the operator and ask for usually, “MUrray Hill-7″ blah, blah, blah, blah. That’s what that is. [MU-7 would be 687]

Last point. When I was in school in Waltham, Mass, I really bugged out that the exchange for all the numbers in town and at the school were also, “891″. They were the very same exchange numbers, in a different area code, that I had grown up with (It made it easy for Fog to remember numbers). One of our regular readers is from there and grew up in Waltham. Perhaps he can tell us what the mnemonic for Waltham’s “891″ was? –fog

[Addendum: From the comments. This is referred to as "The Roosevelt Phone" in the Pinetar household. The ringer box is down below. The crank on the right generates AC ring voltage. If you put your hand on the leads and turn that thing, you will get a shock. Depending on how hard you crank it, you might not like it--at all.

Notice it doesn’t have a dial! No dials needed on these old phones. The operator did all that for you. If you had to dial this thing, you could. You would bang the hook down fast 4 times for a 4 and then pause, then 3 times for a 3 and pause…and so on. You can do that with any phone.

If you see a candlestick phone with a dial and in good shape and it’s not a reproduction (careful, there are good ones out there–especially brass ones), grab it, because it is worth $600 to $1000.

A little hammer goes back and forth between the bells to ring the thing. It is nice and loud. You can hear it outside even. If someone lifts or replaces a receiver anywhere in the house, you will hear a single ding as the hammer goes one way or the other. Same thing late at night when you get one ding, usually at the same time each night. If I dial the old Western Electric deskset in the garage, the bell will ring once, for each number traversed. A zero, would make 10 dings. That tells Mrs. Pinetar inside, to pick up the phone and see what I want. By the same token, if she cranks the crank, every phone in the house will ring and I will pick it up in the garage. Intercom that way.

This phone has been working fine since World War I and still sounds great, if a little tin-y.

This is the ringer box opened up. The three strips on the right side are magnetos, or, magnets that a wire coil turns inside of when the crank is turned. That’s your basic AC generator. Look just above the magnets and you’ll see a red and a green wire. That was my guess as to where to hook up the phone line to make it work. Got it on the first time. The clowns who drink, I mean work, for the phone company today just scratched their butts when I showed them this. The clue for me was a letter stamped into the wood of the box and I think “R” was assumed to be “red” and you know it worked! With phones, the first line is always Red-Green and the second is Yellow-Black. “Christmas Tree and Bumble Bee” is the memory tip. Not hard. –fog