Do You Remember Any Of This?

[PNW-type-gal]

The phone prefixes won't even make sense to the younger generations. I only have 1 phone (an emergency landline for when the power goes out) that has the alpha text on the keys.

When I was growing up we lived in so many places that I can remember phone numbers but not the city they went with....

[Cloudy Dayz]

Originally Posted by pnwguy2

I believe the switchover in Seattle was right around 1972.

Thanks. Doing some research it seems that some other cities held out even longer. Possibly even into the 1980s. It's kind of weird to me though, because even though I grew up in the 1960s, our phones were converted from a switchboard to direct seven digit dialing in 1962. So I never got to experience dialing letters. But we did ignore the first two digits. I learned our phone number as 8-2654, and dialed it that way even in the early 1970s. Even TV show dialogue of that time always used fictitious phone numbers starting with 555. So I only knew of the letter system through older rerun TV shows and old movies.

[Minervah]

Originally Posted by Cloudy Dayz

Thanks. Doing some research it seems that some other cities held out even longer. Possibly even into the 1980s. It's kind of weird to me though, because even though I grew up in the 1960s, our phones were converted from a switchboard to direct seven digit dialing in 1962. So I never got to experience dialing letters. But we did ignore the first two digits. I learned our phone number as 8-2654, and dialed it that way even in the early 1970s. Even TV show dialogue of that time always used fictitious phone numbers starting with 555. So I only knew of the letter system through older rerun TV shows and old movies.

I always find it funny I can remember the exchanges (that's what they called the those two letter abbreviations) for the phone numbers my family had from the time a was a very little kid. Not only the exchanges but the entire names. They were written like this. VA-67820. The VA was the abbreviation for VanBuren. They were mostly street names. We had at one time or another the exchanges ED (Edgewater) ES (Esterbrook) BI (Bittersweet) etc.

But don't ask me what I had for breakfast yesterday.

[pnwguy2]

Here are the old Seattle prefix letters and their longer definitions.

Seattle Area Telephone Prefixes - Old and New

I tried a search for old Portland prefix letters, but it comes up empty. Perhaps someone can beat me on this search!

[Cloudy Dayz]

Originally Posted by pnwguy2

Here are the old Seattle prefix letters and their longer definitions.

Seattle Area Telephone Prefixes - Old and New

I tried a search for old Portland prefix letters, but it comes up empty. Perhaps someone can beat me on this search!

A lot of them are in this database. Just search for Portland.

Telephone EXchange Name Project