Anth>> Southern California, specifically the Los Angeles extended metro area,
>> has been a *HODGE PODGE* of General Telephone (or their predecessors)
>> and Pacific Telephone going back to the 1920s. The GTE areas were the
>> early dial independent telcos that had originally come about prior to
>> the 1920s as competitors to Pacific Tel (Bell).
>> There was also some Continental Telephone in the mix, mostly to the
>> east of the basic L.A. Metro Area, but Contel was taken over by GTE in
>> the early 1990s.
>> The Palm Springs area further to the east is exclusively GTE.
> Contel never saw the ocean side of the So Cal mountains.
> The pockets of pre-GTE that were in the San Fernando Valley, Sierra
> Madre/Monrovia and Palm Springs was California Water and Telephone.
> GTE took that over in 1967.
> Contel showed up to take over some funky company that served
> Victorvile and Eastern Sierra Telephone that served Ridgecrest, the
> Owens Valley and the Eastern High Sierra. That was circa 1950.
> Again,
> Contel was never, ever in the Los Angeles Basin.
Go even farther back and the CWT area in the desert was Cochella Valley Home Telephone, and the north end of the San Fernando Valley was partly Sunland Tujunga Telephone. When I started in with GTE in San Fernando, the company was for the most part still running CWT. The hammer finally fell in the first part of 1968 when General Telephone send managers into the CWT operating areas and they made the changes. I had worked up in Sunland and there were still signs of the old company. I got several old payphone signs, I collected those along with CWT and others. Things were a lot simplier then.
As to Contel, they came into the Victor Valley when the took over California Interstate Telephone, General tried then to take them over.
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