DIAL M FOR MADNESS : Do We Really Need Another Area Code to Remember?
I have had it up to here--that’s 5 feet, 8 inches--with living by the numbers. A checking account number as long as an amino acid sequence, my Social Security number, payroll number, credit card numbers, ATM code, the distance to the moon at apogee and pi to four places are all embedded in the fissures of my reluctant memory.
But these I can accept as the price of a streamlined modern life, the trade-off for not having to write out the grocery list on lambskin vellum. It’s telephone numbers that have pushed me over the edge and into an anonymous digitalized abyss as Orwellian as nine-number ZIP codes and even worse than Thomas Bros. coordinates, which on party invitations look like the host is expecting to call in an air strike if things get too rowdy.
What does L.A. County have now, three area codes? Four? Can you list them all? Does that include the 714-creep into the south end of the county? We have more area codes than some whole states have, more phones than cars, with another area code coming along in a year or so just for cellular phones. How can there be a sense of community in a city where you might have to dial 11 digits to order a good pizza?
As we wring our hands over our want of neighborhood and neighborliness, there’s a practice we could revive to good purpose. It was phased out in the early 1960s, along with the Red Cars and, like the Red Cars, it shouldn’t have been.
We used real words as telephone number prefixes.
Would anyone still hum a Glenn Miller song called 736-5000? Does it not linger in memory because it’s PEnnsylvania 6-5000? Would Liz Taylor have won that Oscar for “228” and not “Butterfield 8”? When a movie character asked for a MUrray Hill number, you knew a swank Manhattanite would answer the phone. I never remembered our street number as a child, but today I can still recite our phone number out of a dead sleep: TWin Oaks 2-3262. Never mind that no oaks were in evidence, let alone a pair.
In Los Angeles, prefixes were an early caller ID. Calling an ANgelus number would ring a phone in East L.A., TOpaz was in Downey, SYcamore in Alhambra and San Marino, and OXnard, mystifyingly, in Beverly Hills.
Well into the 1970s, old phones at The Times bore the number MAdison 5-2345. To reach the rival Herald Examiner, you dialed a RIchmond number. The Anti-Digit Dialing League, headed by the grandson of the great reforming Gov. Hiram W. Johnsson, crusaded against the dehumanizing changeover from word prefixes to numbers, and not everyone has been converted to this day: A firewood store on Sepulveda near Pico still advertises its GRanite phone number.
But with the exception of prefixes such as HOllywood and VEnice, which did indeed ring in Hollywood and Venice, the prefixes had almost no connection to the neighborhoods they compassed. Here is where we can do better:
GOofy for Burbank. SEoul for Koreatown. TEmblor for Northridge. SImpson for Brentwood, TArpit for mid-Wilshire, ENtwistle for the Hollywood Hills (after Peg Entwistle, the starlet who became famous only after plunging off the Hollywood sign). BW for the phones around the old Bullocks Wilshire building. GRidiron for USC, NObel for Caltech. (I’d prefer NErd, but I’m afraid undergrads would dismantle my car and reassemble it in my china closet.)
There’s something so cozy about shared prefixes. People in Topanga Canyon need only exchange the last four digits of their phone numbers because everyone’s prefix is 455.
But let us not use this to paper over our flaws. Improvement projects can be stimulated by assigning frank prefixes to frankly problem neighborhoods. Give CRack to MacArthur Park for its drug trade . . . or to all MTA phone lines for the subway’s structural flaws. WOnk for City Hall. DEcibel for the regions under the flight path at LAX. STrumpet for those red-light boulevards about which I won’t invite indignant phone calls by naming. And SMog for the entire San Gabriel Valley.
