Dating Old Telephone Numbers

NOT necessarily. Could be a small town, with only one exchange, and where it was possible to assign the prefix based on the town name. Such things, although comparatively rare, *did* happen.

There isn't any better way. Because _when_ a territory "moved up" to

It really took the advent of DDD to force all the telcos into 7-digit local numbering. Even then, many phone systems allowed "shortcut" dialing for a number of years. At least where they could do it, without conflicting with the "National" numbering plan.

Before conformance with the National numbering plan, it _was_ "anything goes", and when a locale changed schemas was totally a _local_ decision.

I used to have a coat hanger with the phone number "Green 7" on it. Wish I still had it.

instead

"anything

Thanks. I guess 'look in old phone books' was the better advice.

"Compton" would be the name of the local switch/switchboard location. Could be a street, corner, town, city, etc. In a bigger town it was the area that the switch was in.

Scotty

In larger cities, it was even a more random progression - as the need for numbers exceeded what one prefix could serve, names were made up; most of them are still valid prefixes, when expanded for 7-digit local numbering.

When the additional digit was added in a given CO, the most common convention in the Bell System was to expand the original number block by adding "1" to the _prefix_; thus in your example, COmpton 1361 likely became COmpton 1 - 1361. As NNN-261-1361, it might even still be in service - a very few numbers that old still are.

As to when a given CO expanded to 7-digit form, it is as has been said wildly unpredictable. For example, in Oakland, Ca., which presently has 5 CLLIs (i.e. CO locations), and had ~7 at the time of the switchover (some were consolidated by the '60s), it appears from old phone books that all of the outlying areas expanded first; as of the mid-1940's, the downtown COs (present-day CLLI OKLDCA03) were the last left with the short numbers, even though the demand there was by far the greatest. That has always puzzled me - perhaps harder to make more subscribers, largely businesses, get new letterhead?

Regards,

Don Miller

location.

numbering.

I'm sorry. I should have left more info. Compton is the city. When I grew up there the prefixes were all NEwmark, or 63x-xxxx. So this number used the city name, and four digits. I would guess that this means the hanger was from before that time, maybe before WW 2 when they still had manual switchboards. Thanks.