Meador Manor

In my previous post, I outlined the history of phone numbers in Bartlesville, which became my home in 1989. This post looks at my personal telephone memories from the late 1960s to present.

Bell Telephone, including the Southwestern Bell subsidiary serving Oklahoma City, had abandoned using exchange names in telephone numbers in 1968, before I could form lasting memories. So I never learned phone numbers using words. I first noticed old exchange numbers because one had been printed on a vintage yardstick my parents used. Ever curious, I asked my mother about it, and she filled me in.

SKyline-1

We lived in the Western Village neighborhood of northwest Oklahoma City until I graduated from kindergarten in the early 1970s. By the time I was memorizing phone numbers, my parents’ home phone number was no longer referred to as SKyline 1-#### but instead just 751-####.

My memories of telephones when we lived in the Skyline exchange serving our Western Village neighborhood in Oklahoma City are limited to how my father had a separate “company phone” in his den that was tied into Cities Service Gas Company, and that I would yank my Fisher-Price Chatter Telephone into the room and jabber away, pretending I was taking care of important company business.

While I have always had a clear memory of the address of our home in Western Village, I had to look up our old phone number and its exchange.

SUnset-9

Our next stop was in Bethany, a town subsumed within northwestern OKC, while I was in the first through sixth grades. Our phone prefix changed from 751- to 789-, but I didn’t think of it as moving from the SKyline-1 exchange to SUnset-9.

I dimly recall a green rotary kitchen phone and that my parents had their own extension phone in their bedroom. It always took longer to dial the higher digits on a rotary phone, so I knew our number, which consisted entirely of phone numbers between 7 and 0, was something a business would have avoided if at all possible.

My father again had a company phone, which had its own bell installed under an eave in the backyard, ensuring he would hear it outside, since as a company executive he might need to deal with emergencies. It was important that natural gas service be maintained for multiple communities across several states, especially in the winter months.

Eventually, I was entrusted with updating my father’s company phone directory. That was a small binder with pages in different sections with company and staff phone numbers. Every month, updated pages would be provided and my job was to pull out the old ones and insert the new ones. I enjoyed what an adult would have found to be a tedious exercise.

One other thing I remember about phone technology back then was that the wall plugs were not the modular RJ11 4-position 4-contact plugs of today but instead bulky things with four large prongs.

WIndsor-2

We moved again when I was entering junior high. Our new phone number began with 942-, and I soon realized that corresponded to WIndsor-2, which made sense because our new neighborhood was Windsor Hills. Some of the homes in the neighborhood with older lines were actually 946-, which matched up with WINdsor.

I associate our move to Windsor Hills with upgrading from rotary phones to Princess push-button ones with the mysterious * and # buttons. Eventually the * button became associated with various Custom Local Area Signaling Services, while the pound button (which some call hash, and the engineers originally called the octotherp) is still often used to indicate the end of a sequence of signals. While my parents paid to rent Princess phones with touchtone signaling, when premium signaling services like call waiting and Caller ID were rolled out, my folks declined.

The buttons lit up on our new phones, which required that each one be connected to an external electric transformer that plugged into a wall power plug, and the phones had a night light mode.

I got an extension phone in my bedroom. Throughout my childhood people would ask me for my favorite color, and I had settled on green, although I didn’t particularly care. So yes, I had a green phone. I found a 1978 photo of me proudly showing off my new phone, and I remember lying on the bed a few years later while on the phone for hours for many nights trying to puzzle through algebra homework with schoolmate Susan Plant.

Back then, you weren’t allowed to own your own telephone. You had to rent one from Southwestern Bell, although I noticed that at our vacation cabin in Missouri there was an old rotary phone even though we didn’t have a working phone line there. It had been left behind by the previous owners, and evidently the local phone company wasn’t too worried about it. Maybe it didn’t rent phones.

Long-distance phone calls were rather expensive before AT&T was broken up. I remember my father placing and receiving calls to relatives late at night at home. When we were at our cabin in Missouri, we would drive out to an old phone booth outside a general store some miles down the highway to make calls.

I would later experience that myself, and I remember fumbling with a card late on some cold winter nights at a phone kiosk so I could punch in a ridiculously long sequence of numbers to use a Southwestern Bell calling plan and talk to my girlfriend. I remember the cutting cold wind making me curse that they had taken out the phone booth and replaced it with a kiosk. Superman also found that change frustrating back in 1978.

Eventually my home phone became a Trimline model, but I found the buttons in the handset a mixed blessing.

In the early 1980s, the rental fee was $1.50 to about $5 per month depending on the type of phone. That finally changed in 1983, when the U.S. government broke up Bell Telephone into AT&T and various “Baby Bells” such as Southwestern Bell. Consumers in all parts of the country suddenly had the option to buy their own phone.

Before that, the Western Electric subsidiary of American Telephone & Telegraph was the primary manufacturer of equipment for the Bell System. One of my aunts worked at the big Western Electric plant in Oklahoma City, which made pay telephones and switching equipment.

After the breakup

When I was in high school I did have my own phone line. That wasn’t for my privacy or convenience, but for my parents. I had a 300 baud Radio Shack modem with my TRS-80 Color Computer which I used to call electronic bulletin boards and early dialup services like Dow Jones and CompuServe. They didn’t want my long modem sessions to tie up the main house line.

While living in Oklahoma City and then for a few of my first years in Bartlesville, I operated a computer-based bulletin board system that was part of FidoNet. To avoid any long distance charges, I programmed it with the codes of the telephone exchanges that were local calls, and that was probably the last time I paid much attention to phone exchanges.

Over the years I went through a multitude of modems to connect my personal computers to online services as baud rates increased from 300 baud to 56k. The sound of the connection handshake got longer and longer over time as different standards were implemented.

After the phone monopoly ended, my parents just purchased their existing Princess telephones from Southwestern Bell. When I moved to a dormitory at the University of Oklahoma, I went to the local Radio Shack and spent $100, which would be about $300 in 2024, on a fancy DUōFONE-140.

Initially, I placed that phone on my little built-in desk in the dorm, next to my 13″ Zenith CRT television. But after a month or so, I noticed the television picture had a color shift in one corner. The magnets in the phone were affecting the shadow mask and thus deflecting the electron beams. I had to move the telephone across the room and degauss the TV.

Fascinated by technology, I later bought a couple of different cassette and later microcassette tape answering machines. I remember entering my different apartments, seeing the blinking red light on the answering machine, and wondering what message I would soon be receiving.

My favorite landline telephone was a Unisonic Model 9335, which had a particularly light, sleek, and comfortable handset and nice controls. I finally gave up on landline phones at home when I went fully cellular in May 2009.

My early cell phones were flip phones and one of the Nokia “chocolate bar” phones, and their lack of full keyboards discouraged me from texting. That eased once I had an iPhone.

My last big involvement with wired telephones was reviewing and approving the purchase of a new internal phone system and handsets for the school district back in 2018. That system uses the Voice over Internet Protocol, not Plain Old Telephone Service. The only traditional landline phones we still have in the district are a single emergency phone in each school office and some lines for elevators.

In less than 20 months, I’ll be retiring. For the first time in my lifetime, after I turn 60 years of age I can expect to seldom interact with a wired telephone. Despite the nostalgia apparent in this post, that is one thing I shall not miss.

What do the song PEnnsylvania 6-5000, the book BUtterfield 8, and the movie Dial M for Murder have in common? All of their titles refer to telephone exchanges. Bartlesville only used exchange names in its phone numbers for about a decade, circa 1958 to 1968.

In the early days, there were so few telephone lines in smaller communities that phone numbers were just a few digits. The 1907-1908 Prewitt’s Directory for Bartlesville, Indian Territory, which was printed just before statehood, has phone numbers of two and three digits.

Telephone service in Bartlesville dated back to the late 1800s with an exchange above the Hull Drug Store on the south side of 3rd Street (now Frank Phillips Boulevard) between Johnstone and Dewey Avenues. It opened with three phones, which expanded to seven, and the bell was hooked to the bed of the operator. The first telephone operator was a Ms. Green, and many of the early phones were for doctors.

The Cherokee National Telephone Company established a Bartlesville exchange in 1901. In 1905 the Indian Territory Telephone Company had a copper line stretching from Bartlesville to Tulsa, and that same year the Cherokee National was purchased by Pioneer Telephone and Telegraph.

As communities grew, phone numbers grew in length to where they would challenge the 4-9 digit short-term memory of a typical human being. So Bell Telephone started using telephone exchange names in locations needing over four digits. Those were memorable names assigned to a central office’s switching system. Usually the first two letters of the name corresponded to prefix digits in a two letters+five numbers format, although various combinations and lengths were in use in different communities.

BUtterfield-8 was a 1935 John O’Hara novel, and then a 1960 movie, in which BU-8, or 288, was the exchange for Manhattan’s well-to-do Upper East Side.

PEnnsylvania 6-5000 indicated 736-5000, which was the phone number for the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City. Its phone number became the title of a swing jazz and pop standard of the Glenn Miller Orchestra.

As for Dial M for Murder, that was a 1954 Hitchcock film based on a stage play in which a scheming husband dials his home phone MAIda Vale 3499, or 624-3499, to awaken his wife and set in motion an attempted murder.

The rotary dial for a telephone was patented in 1892, with holes in the finger wheel introduced in 1904, but they weren’t common until the 1920s.

Area Codes

The popular culture references I cited all lacked something: an area code. That’s because at the time you didn’t need to dial an area code as part of a local phone number. In fact, Direct Distance Dialing, allowing one to make long-distance calls without the assistance of a human operator, didn’t begin until 1951, slowly expanding from New Jersey to become widespread in the 1960s as the system began to include automatic toll-switching centers, electronic switching systems, and automatic message accounting computers.

I’ve shown a page from the 1955 Bartlesville telephone directory with instructions on how to make a long distance call. You can tell they didn’t have Direct Distance Dialing yet!

The 405 area code had been established by AT&T and the Bell System in 1947 and covered the entire state of Oklahoma at that time. In 1953, the 918 code for northeastern Oklahoma was split off from 405. 580 for western and southern Oklahoma was split from 405 in 1997.

Until 2011, 7-digit local dialing was still possible statewide, but then 539 was added as an overlay to the 918 area code rather than doing a split. Having two area codes for the same geographic region forced a change to 10-digit dialing there, and that spread to the 405 area code region in 2021 when 572 was added as an overlay to it.

Pioneer Telephone

Oklahoma had 135 commercial systems and 63 incorporated phone companies at statehood in 1907. By 1912, Pioneer Telephone and Telegraph Company had 115 exchanges in Oklahoma, with 114,975 miles of aerial wire and 19,480 miles of underground wire.

The Pioneer Telephone Building still stands in downtown Bartlesville on the west side of Dewey Avenue north of 4th Street, with its distinctive blue bells on the pilasters. It was an early fireproof building in the city, erected just a couple of years before Southwestern Bell was formed in 1912 as a consolidation of the Southwestern Telephone Company of Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas with the Pioneer Telephone and Telegraph Company, the Missouri and Kansas Telephone Company, and the Bell Telephone Company of Missouri.

A few miles north was the small telephone office in Dewey. At one time, calling from Bartlesville to Dewey was a long distance call, something we struggle to imagine these days.

Contrast that to the Bartlesville phone office in 1929, with over three times as many operators for local, toll inward, and outward stations.

Back in 1954, Southwestern Bell had an open house at its Bartlesville office, inviting residents to come see the equipment in action, see a machine that “plays tick-tack-toe and never loses a game”, and see a demonstration microwave relay in which they could break the beam transmitting music with their hand and reflect it with a metal mirror.

I used to do a related demonstration when I taught Advanced Placement physics night lectures at Bartlesville High School. Instead of using a microwave transmitter and receiver, I would modulate a laser beam with the audio signal from my iPod or iPhone and aim it at a solar panel connected to an amplified speaker.

Before FEderal-6 and EDison-3

Back in the mid-1950s, Bartlesville did not yet use exchange names in its phone numbers, but it did have some numbers with party line suffixes. The 1955 city telephone directory is filled not only with three and four-digit numbers, but also four-digit numbers followed by the letter suffixes J, M, R, or W. Those indicate party lines, where multiple households shared a number. The suffix letters they used had been chosen to not be easily misheard when spoken.

Some dials back in the day lacked most of the letters, but still sported the letters needed to help you complete a party line call.

The concept of the party line was instrumental to the plot of another popular entertainment, the 1959 movie Pillow Talk, with Doris Day and Rock Hudson unhappily sharing a line.

Other phone number schemes were also in use. The same 1955 phone directory has two-digit numbers in Copan mixed in with longer sequences like 814-F-11 and 810-F-31.

Dewey phone numbers in 1955 did use the exchange name system. They were all KE 4-#### or KEllogg-4 numbers.

A new building briefly brought FEderal-6 and EDison-3 to town

In 1957, Southwestern Bell constructed a $3 million Bartlesville office on the southwest corner of Dewey Avenue and 6th Street (now Silas Street). It was two stories with a basement, built such that a third floor could be added.

The ground floor had the big crossbar switching system and customer service, while upstairs was the microwave system and mobile phone equipment and operators. The basement had the test room, which could be used to determine if someone added an extra line without paying for it.

That new facility also brought the use of seven-digit numbers with exchange names. Bartlesville started having FEderal-6 numbers associated with the west side of the Caney River and EDison-3 numbers on the rapidly expanding east side.

Witness the mix of FEderal, EDison, and Dewey KEllogg exchanges in a yellow pages listing for Cities Service gas stations in 1959.

The use of phone exchange names in phone listings began to be phased out in the 1960s, so FEderal and EDison didn’t last very long in Bartlesville. I was assigned a 335-#### phone number when I moved to town in 1989, so I suppose I could have shared it as EDison5-####, but that would have elicited some stares and confusion.

Back then, the Bell Building next to the old Civic Center was still adorned with a large microwave antenna up top, hidden within a decorative shroud. That provided a wireless link to Tulsa, via a large relay antenna near Ramona, in case the regular lines were cut.

By 1968, 40% of all long-distance telephone traffic in the USA was carried by AT&T’s TD-2 microwave relay network, and it also carried 95% of the country’s inter-city television signals. The development of fiber optic cables and geostationary communications satellites eventually rendered the microwave relays obsolete, and in 1999 AT&T sold off the towers.

They removed the KKB56 microwave antenna from atop our local phone building some years ago, and nowadays far fewer employees work in the building, which the internet indicates is still equipped with Ribbon/Genband/Nortel DMS-100/200 switches but has no public office.

There was a time when you had to dial 1 before a number to signal to the routing system that a call would be going outside the area code. But that is pretty much obsolete in the USA these days, at least when using a cell phone.

Landline Decline

Marshall McLuhan advised: “Obsolescence never meant the end of anything, it’s just the beginning.”

In 2007, I finally cancelled my old-style landline phone, briefly switched to Vonage, and then I went fully cellular in May 2009. So I said goodbye to the old EDison exchange and, since my original cell phone was with U.S. Cellular, joined the 440- exchange. I left U.S. Cellular a few years later, when I purchase my first iPhone, as AT&T was the only carrier for the iPhone at the time. But number portability meant I was able to remain with my old number in the 440- exchange. When my wife bought her first iPhone years later, it was through AT&T and that put her in the 766- exchange along with other new AT&T accounts. Thankfully our marriage has survived our being in different telephone exchanges, something that would have been more challenging in the old landline days.

When I gave up my landline, only about 1 in 5 adult Americans had only cell phones. That has increased to well over 70% in 2024.

So most homes no longer have landline telephones. When I was young we would receive an immense phone book each year in Oklahoma City. My mother would keep it on one of the seats at the dinner table to boost me up so that I could eat more comfortably. In the 1970s, it expanded into two separate books, each several inches thick, one with white paper phone listings and another with yellow pages of business listings and advertisements. When I moved to Bartlesville, the thinness of the local telephone book was only one of several lifestyle changes. The latest phone book was left beside our mailbox the other day, and it sure seems like a relic.

But time marches on, and now when we “reach out and touch someone”, most of us do that wirelessly and give little thought to an old meaning for “exchange”. In 2024, AT&T announced that by 2029 it would abandon landline service across 20 states, including Oklahoma.