During a strike when managers were called on to work th switchboards, I once handled a person-to-person call collect to someone started somewhere south along the Mississippi River and was referred again and again to places serially north along the river (complete with telephone number) and finally reached him at a pay phone well up the river and he immediately accepted it on a Bell credit card.
That kind of service went with person-to-person calls. People trying to locate someone for business reasons (and perhaps other reasons) would call for a person by name and give several numbers in different places to try. At some of those numbers you might find people with further information about where to try. I very valuable resource for people in some lines of business. Wes Leatherock snipped-for-privacy@aol.com snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com