The other thing is the evolution of the telephone. If you're my age, growing up phone numbers were 7 digits long. In the event that you were calling someone "long distance" in another state or something, then you added 1 and a 3 digit "area code." Of course during my adult years cell phones became prevalent and now phone numbers are 10 digits long--the area code is just part of someone's phone number.
I mention this because a friend got me a 1943 Louisville phone book. And the dialing is wild. You know how phones have letters assigned to the numbers on their dials? It's the way phone numbers used to be: MA(gnolia)-2506-R. I'm not old enough to remember this, but I'm old enough to have seen it in stories or on old signs. Sometimes it isn't even 7 "digits". I'm looking at a HI(ghland)-6689 number.
Then there's the suburbs. So, looking at this phone book, if I'm in Jeffersontown and want to call Louisville, I dial 2+ the number. So: 2-MA-2506-R or 2-HI-6689 in the cases above. If I'm calling someone else in Jeffersontown, it's just 5685--like dialing another room in a hotel or office (do hotel rooms and offices even have phones anymore?). If someone in Louisville wants to call me, they dial 21-5685.
Poop. I had one other related thing on my mind, but I got distracted and now I forgot it. OH! That's it. Old pay phones. This is from History channel reruns. You know how the first pay phones worked? You'd dial the number and the operator would be on the line and tell you what the call cost. Then, depending on the size of the coin--nickel, dime, quarter, etc--it would be routed to different paths in the phone and it would hit a different sound-making device--bell, etc and the operator would know how much money you'd put in by listening for the sounds the coins made when they went into the phone. How wild is that?
