(from:
"Time and t-t-t-temperature Posted by MWallenfang at 1/13/2009 3:53 PM CST on PostCrescent.com
A Darboy businessman saved a 59-year-old Appleton institution.
People in Appleton have been calling (920) 734-0123 since 1950 to hear the time and temperature, but AT&T shut down most of its time/temperature phone lines in Wisconsin in recent years because of declining use in the age of cell phones and Internet.
Plus, there?s the high cost of upgrading equipment. The Appleton area time/temp line was turned off around Thanksgiving.
Darboy resident Vern Schmitt missed it, and being a self-proclaimed phone enthusiast, he got the number from AT&T and reinstated the service in December.
If you?ve called in the last few weeks to confirm just how bone chilling it is out there, you may have noticed the change.
His company, D-J Telephone Systems in Appleton, picked up the bill for new equipment and phone lines. In the future, he?s thinking about taking on other sponsors to help with costs.
"It was important to have back as a community service," he said. "I get 1,800 to 3,000 calls a day, depending on conditions."
The bonus with Vern?s revamp: you now also now hear the day and date.
I remember dialing that number for temperature information a LOT when I was a kid. Kewl that someone has stepped in to keep it going.
Man, that line was in service since 1950 - (memory flow alert!) dial telephone service was cut in in Appleton in 1949 and from that time until about 1968 or
1969, one only needed to dial the last five digits of the number to connect a local call dialed from Appleton (733 or 734 numbers).2-xxxx - Menasha-Neenah ('722')
3-xxxx - Appleton ('733') 4-xxxx - Appleton ('734') 5-xxxx - Menasha-Neenah ('725') 6-xxxx - Kaukauna ('766') 7-xxxx - Greenville ('757' - now part of the Appleton rate center) 8-xxxx - Little Chute ('788') and a bit later on 9-xxxx - Appleton ('739')That ended in the late 1960s when the local numbers ran out, with AT&T/Wisconsin Telephone then adding 731 to Appleton and 729 to Menasha/Neenah, and the local calling area was expanded to include Black Creek ('984'), Hortonville ('779'), Sherwood ('989') and Shiocton ('986') - and we've been dialing the seven digits ever since.
That, too, will end in a couple of years when NPA 274 comes to the 920 area, requiring that all ten digits of the number be dialed on all calls.
-- ___________________________________________ ____ _______________ Regards, | |\\ ____ | | | | |\\ Michael G. Koerner May they | | | | | | rise again! Appleton, Wisconsin USA | | | | | | ___________________________________________ | | | | | | _______________
***** Moderator's Note *****Please do not use windows-1252 as a character set! We can handle ISO-8859-1, but that's all!
Bill Horne Temporary Moderator
Please put [Telecom] at the end of your subject line, or I may never see your post! Thanks!
We have a new address for email submissions: telecomdigestmoderator atsign telecom-digest.org. This is only for those who submit posts via email: if you use a newsreader or a web interface to contribute to the digest, you don't need to change anything.