Getting a Line on L.A. : Survey Finds a Majority of Residents Keep Their Phone Numbers Unlisted

For years, Americans have ridiculed Southern California’s fabled rootlessness, that sense of disconnected ennui, New Age cocooning and traffic-jam isolation chronicled by unfriendly East Coast writers.

Californians themselves often have been impatient with such analysis and quick to discount it as envy and sour grapes from people bitter about lack of sunshine and orange blossoms in their lives.

Now, however, marketing researchers from the frosty environs of Fairfield, Conn., have produced a troubling survey that seems to back up with real numbers some longstanding impressions about the self-absorbed West Coast.

Survey Sampling Inc. reports that residents of Los Angeles have become so disdainful of uninvited contact with the outside world that more than half have unlisted telephone numbers, far more than in any major city in the country.

The Connecticut company, which sells telephone numbers to market research firms, said the 56% figure for unlisted numbers in Los Angeles is exceeded only in Las Vegas, whose residents’ rootlessness and nighttime schedules have produced an unlisted phone rate of 60.3%.

According to the survey, 8 of the top 10 U.S. metropolitan areas for unlisted numbers are in California.

John Lamb, the firm’s client-service specialist, said he is not certain what produced this phenomenon but gives some credence to the notion that “a lot of people who live in California screwed up something in the East and are trying to get as far away from that and from other people as possible.”

Another factor may be a high percentage of young adults in the West. The survey shows that, throughout the country, two-thirds of those with unlisted numbers are under 40.

Unlike older Americans, many of whom apparently consider unlisted numbers faintly unneighborly, the younger generation appears to see great advantage in keeping its phone numbers secret from salesmen, fund-raisers and rejected suitors, even if it costs an extra 30 cents a month.

The average percentage of unlisted numbers for all metropolitan areas in the country climbed from 21.8% in 1984 to 27.6% last year, and Lamb said the steady growth will continue.

Charlene Baldwin, spokeswoman for Pacific Bell, said her records show a somewhat smaller percentage of unlisted numbers. About 45% of the company’s 1.9 million customers in Los Angeles County are unlisted, as are about 40% of all Bell customers in the state.

Once a Sign of Fame

This goes much higher in areas such as Beverly Hills, “where you don’t see a very large phone book,” she said.

Unlisted numbers once were considered signs of fame and fortune, of people too important to be bothered. But the survey indicates a similar reluctance on the lower end of the income scale to list telephone numbers, particularly as computerized campaigns to sell everything from toothpaste to travel packages flood telephone lines around dinner time.

Many people take their numbers out of the book in the hope of preventing such calls.

This often does not work, because many firms use random-dialing systems that catch unlisted numbers anyway.

The resulting customer distress plants potentially profitable seeds of interest in a new device that will let the discriminating resident screen all calls while the phone is ringing.

Known as “Caller ID” or “Custom Local Area Signaling Service (CLASS),” the system uses a small, $80 box that attaches to the telephone and provides a digital display of the number from which the call is placed. If the number is unfamiliar or that of an annoying friend or angry boss, the call can be ignored.

Baldwin said the system is to be introduced in California over the next year and will include such refinements as a special ring for calls from special friends whose numbers have been programmed into the device.

In New Jersey, where the system is available, initial response was “three times what we expected,” said New Jersey Bell spokesman James W. Carrigan.

Washington ranks only eighth among major metropolitan areas and 47th overall in unlisted numbers, but its 26.2%--very close to C&P; Telephone Co. estimates--is enough to suggest a healthy market for Caller ID.

Telephone surprises, unpleasant or otherwise, then would diminish. Life would proceed more quietly in self-sufficient cocoons of automatic telephone monitoring, videocassette recorders and shopping by cable, letting introspection continue without further interruption.