From Normandy to Dunkirk

As far as I can tell from what she has told me about her child, my mother never left her home state of Missouri until she went away to college in New Jersey at the age of nineteen. But at the same time, she grew up in Normandy.

Normandy (or, properly, NOrmandy, to indicate the dialed letters) was the telephone exchange given to Nevada, Missouri, the little town where she grew up. To give you a sense of the very different telecommunications environment she lived in, my mother tells me that, as a child of six or seven in the late 1950s, she once picked up the telephone receiver in her parents' home and told the operator she wanted to speak to "Grandma." My great-grandmother, who ran a small restaurant on the outskirts of town, was sufficiently well-known that the operator was able to complete the call without any further information.

Telephone exchange names, which existed from roughly 1910 until the late 1960s in the United States (and apparently appeared in some local phone directories as late as the early 1980s), were designed to solve a problem that never really existed. As more and more telephones were installed in the 1920s, an era before most homes had dial phones, telephone numbers extended in some areas to have first five digits, then six, then seven. Phone company executives felt that six- and seven-digit numbers were too long for operators to remember when connecting calls, so they decreed that phone numbers would begin with a mnemonic word that corresponded to the first two (in Britain and some larger American cities, three) digits. Thus, 736-5000 became PEnnsylvania 6-5000.

As a fan of all things retro, I decided to use one when I set up an answering machine on the landline phone in my apartment (why I choose to have a landline will be the subject of another blog post). This led to a problem: I didn't actually know what exchange my number had been part of before all-digit dialing came to Philadelphia. Searching the internet, however, I was able to find a list of recommended exchange names the Bell Telephone Company put out in the mid-1950s, when telephone numbers across the country were being standardized to two letters, five digits. For exchanges beginning with 38 (as does my phone number), Ma Bell listed five choices: DUdley, DUnkirk, DUpont, EVergreen, and FUlton. So I guess that in addition to living in Pennsylvania, I now also live in Dunkirk.

Why bother with this practice, aside from retrophilia or shock value? I think a good reason for using telephone exchange names is the one the phone companies came up for almost a century ago: they make phone numbers easier to remember. As cell phones have become ubiquitous, people seem to know and remember fewer and fewer phone numbers. I've even met people who hadn't bothered to memorize their own and can only give out their phone number by dialing you from their cell. Bringing words back into phone numbers might be an aid to children who at the very least need to remember Mommy and Daddy's cell and/or work numbers.