Phone Numbers

I was happy to learn that I was wrong about everything.

photo by Paul Vlachos

My childhood phone number in Yonkers began with 779, but I learned it as "SPencer 9," referring to the “exchange,” a long-forgotten concept dating back to when the phone company labeled numbers according to the circuit they were connected to. My best friend Roland's number was 337, or "DEerfield 7." My grandparents were at 237, but we said "BEverly 7" or, usually, "BE7." The phone company standardized the exchanges in 1955 and published a list of recommended names. If your number began with the numerals "58," for example, Ma Bell's list recommended that you use the names "JUpiter," "JUno," "JUstice," LUdlow," or "LUther" to remember them by. Our "SPencer-9" was not on the list, so it may have originated earlier or there may have been another reason, lost to the ages.

Up through the 1990s, you had a number and it was your "phone number," not your "home number." Some people also had an "office number" or "work number," but that was the extent of it. Having a fax number in your home was rare. You lived with your phone number until you moved somewhere else, at which point you got a new number and let everybody know what it was, just as you would let people know about a new mailing address. Somebody else would eventually be assigned your old number and they might have to field calls from old friends of yours who hadn't gotten the news. Phone numbers were not portable because phones were not portable.

That pre-cellphone world was another universe. In my late 20s, I was cursed with a job that required me to drive to Yonkers every other day. I had escaped from Yonkers when I was 18 and, before this job, I never went back, except to visit my parents. Now, I had to drive there all the time to haul baked cakes and frozen pastries downtown from the commercial kitchen. My boss's West African bakers had been banished to Yonkers years earlier during a business merger.

I sat in nonstop traffic all the way back to the glittering coffee shop in the West Village, all alone with the thoughts in my head. I spent the whole day that way. I listened to the truck radio, always the oldies station, WCBS-FM, 101.1 on the FM dial, and I would sometimes carry a small cassette boombox with me, along with a few cassettes. I would listen to the whole side of a tape. You had to. Analog is linear. If I needed to call the shop, I would stop at a payphone or, more often than not, wait until I got to the Yonkers bakery and call from there. Sometimes, I would walk in and they would say, "Call Kelly," my boss back in the city.

I drove all day, every day. I took one day off every two weeks. When the time came for my first real vacation, my then-wife and I drove south. I was unfamiliar with the term "busman's holiday" until then. We borrowed my father's car and set out for Washington, D.C. When we got there, the government went on strike. I had either not been reading the news or else I was just oblivious. I had dim knowledge about the country's geography, even at the age of 29.

Before cellphones, I never thought to research a place before I went there. I just went. After Washington D.C.,I thought we should check out Virginia Beach, which I imagined to be a sleepy fishing village on the Eastern Seaboard. It was nothing like I had thought it was, so we pushed on to the next sleepy little seaside village on my mental road map – Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. It was a good drive. I was chain smoking and listening to music. Myrtle Beach was a terrible tourist hellhole, though, so we kept going. I was happy to learn that I was wrong about everything.

Why not Florida? I knew some people from the bakery who were supposed to be in Orlando at exactly the same time, so we steered towards what I thought was another oceanside town. I didn't know that Orlando was landlocked. I had assumed that every place in Florida was on the ocean. Wrong again, but I still had a blast. We drove back gonzo style, in two long days, and I discovered that I loved road trips. This discovery would have profound implications on the rest of my life.

Shortly after that trip, my marriage fell apart. My wife kept our old phone number and I moved ten blocks south, still in the West Village of New York City. I got a new 212 number in the same 807 exchange. When I got my own telephone number, it was as significant to me as getting a new bank account, which I also did at that time. When I added a beeper number, it felt personal. That was the first device I carried on me, clipped to my jeans.

When my friends changed numbers, I would cross out the old one and write the new one in my desktop address book and also the small, pocket-sized address book I carried around. You could track somebody's life and even their stability by how many cross-outs were next to their name in your address book. I might have come across as fairly stable if you were to judge me strictly by the longevity of my telephone number.

The phone company had automated the process of changing numbers, so they would deliver a message saying "the number you are calling has been changed. The NEW number is…" and their robotic voice would put more of an inflection on the word "new." This courtesy was good only if you were moving, not if two people were splitting up and one kept the old number, so I had to let everyone know that mine had changed.

In my new apartment, I had a touch-tone phone. We had had a rotary-dial phone in our old apartment, up until 1990. We switched to a “push button phone” not long before the split. The phone company used to charge extra for touch-tone service. They did this long after most people had switched over from rotary dial service to touch tone. It was another way to generate steady revenue, similar to the "service line repair" charge that they tacked onto the bill every month.
Worse, in the early 1990s, the phone company began to require Manhattan residents to dial "1-212" before dialing a local number. Until then, seven digits had been enough to connect you with your party. Even though New York had gotten “212” for its primacy in business - it was the fastest to dial with a rotary phone - it still sucked to dial extra numbers.

With the explosion of fax lines and beeper numbers, the city ran out of 212 numbers. At the same time, the other boroughs picked up their own area codes. It became a technical necessity to dial the area code before the number any time you made a phone call. I was not happy about any of this. Aside from now having to dial a much longer number, there was the feeling that we were not living in what felt like a small town anymore. Dialing a local number with an area code felt less personal.

I don’t think about any of this anymore, which is kind of odd. Everybody is in my cell phone’s contacts and I just touch somebody’s name. Is that more personal? I don’t know. Has the small town migrated to the confines of my phone? The mechanical phone system felt more a part of the real world, but that was true of everything back then. Few things feel real now, except that I need coffee. Coffee is real.

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An earlier version of this piece appeared in The Space Age Now: A Personal History of Machines, Technology and Life, from 1960 through 2020, Narrated by a Surviving Crew Member from the 20th Century.

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