Interesting numbers come up on a leisurely walk through a city’s history in a telephone directory

Of all the old reliables of American life that have been outdated by the computer and corporate insanity, the one I miss most is the telephone company.

There was one company; service was good; a single bill came once a month; it was simple and usually accurate. If anything went wrong with your telephone, you went next door and called the company and they sent a man out who fixed it. Free of charge.

Now the phone company is fragmented. A dozen maverick companies solicit us in television ads that are almost as ubiquitous as beer ads. If anything goes wrong with your phone it costs $24 just to have them come out and tell you what’s wrong with it.

We were paying $40 a month rent for our phones, so recently we took them back to the phone company and bought five phones in a store and our older son installed them.

They work all right except that instead of the old-fashioned ring we get a buzz. If you’re in the shower or outdoors, forget it. It sounds something like a rattlesnake. The only advantage in having this buzz, instead of a ring, is that now, whenever the phone rings on a television show we happen to be watching, we know it isn’t our phone. I was always getting up to answer our phone when we were watching TV, only to find out it hadn’t rung.

The other day when I was being interviewed by a class of fourth-graders from Stephen S. Wise Temple Day School, one of them said, “The first phone call was in 1915. Did your family have a phone? If not, how did you communicate?”

I answered that I did not go back quite that far; that we always had a phone; but I didn’t point out that we had telephones long before 1915. Alexander Graham Bell patented his invention in March, 1876, and the first commercial telephone switchboard was placed in service in New Haven, Conn., in January, 1878.

In Los Angeles, as early as April, 1882, there was a Los Angeles exchange and a directory listing 90 subscribers. Rex Wakefield, of Glendale, has sent me a copy of that directory reprinted as an advertisement for Jet Delivery Inc. It is simply a folded sheet of paper.

It is illustrated by a picture of one of those long wall telephones of that era with two bells at the top, and it instructs subscribers to call “Central Office” by ringing “two bells.” The user is also instructed to “give telephone number, and not name of subscriber,” though I imagine that in 1882 the young women who worked at central knew everyone’s phone number, and probably everything about everyone’s business affairs and private life, too.

The list of subscribers gives us a good cross section of life in Los Angeles in the early 1880s. Of the 90 subscribers, only 21 were residences. These were the homes of the city’s biggest businessmen and socially elite, such as B. F. Coulter, H. W. Hellman, Harris Newmark and H. W. Workman.

There were seven physicians. It seems that Los Angeles was always a fertile ground for the practice of medicine. There were also two undertakers, to handle their failures.

Though Los Angeles had a reputation as a cesspool of sin, there were only two saloons (at least only two with telephones), both on Main Street.

There were three livery stables, one on 5th Street between Fort (Broadway) and Hill, and two on Main. There were no auto dealers or garages.

H. W. Hellman’s residence was on 4th Street between Main and Spring. It was this Hellman who built the Hellman Building at 4th and Spring. It was the first big building in what was to become the Spring Street financial district, and it stands today.

Harris Newmark lived on Fort Street; his phone number was 57. This Newmark had come to Los Angeles as a teen-ager and gone into the wholesale grocery business. He laid out the city of Montebello with his nephew, Kaspare Cohn, and later wrote his celebrated memoir, “Sixty Years in Southern California.” His nephew, by the way, lived at 7th and Spring and his number was 43.

Other businesses in the directory included lumber yards, druggists, insurance agents, the First National Bank, a wine cellar, a wholesale liquor house, the New York Brewery, the Los Angeles Ice Co., Wells, Fargo & Co., the Southern Pacific Railroad, a books and stationery house, and the University of Southern California. So even then we were not a cultural desert.

Visitors could stay at the Cosmopolitan, the Pico House and the U.S. Hotel, all on Main. The Los Angeles Times is not in the directory, but the Mirror is listed as being at 9 Temple Street.

Police Headquarters was on Spring Street, Henry King, Chief (number 30), and so was the Post Office, I. R. Dunkelberger, postmaster (number 14). The Evergreen Cemetery was in Boyle Heights. It is the only establishment that hasn’t moved or vanished in all these years.

There were hardware men, fruit dealers, grocers, dry goods men and, of course, real estate men. But I am puzzled by the absence of lawyers. It doesn’t seem possible that a nascent metropolis with doctors, saloon keepers, undertakers, real estate men, lumbermen and policemen could have existed without lawyers; but perhaps legal matters were handled by Judson, Gillette & Gibson, notaries public.

Even odder than the absence of lawyers is the absence of ministers and churches.

Maybe it was a cesspool, after all.