For a Good Time, Don’t Call the Solomons

Vol. 1, No. 1 of the Solomon Family News was published on April Fool’s Day. Friends who received the letter might have been suspicious, but the timing was just coincidental. The news was absolutely factual.

April 1 happened to be the day Dr. Gil L. Solomon and his wife, Judy, got a new phone number for their West Hills home. The newsletter was their way of informing friends of their new listing and explaining why.

The tale is something of a suburban mystery, with a family physician cast in the role of detective. It all began several weeks ago, when the telephone rang at three hours past midnight.

Judy answered and heard a man’s voice.

“What girls do you have available?”

She figured it was a wrong number and hung up. But three nights later, it happened again. This was disconcerting, in part because the Solomons have three daughters, ages 15, 13 and 9. Hanging up the phone, she told her husband about the previous call.

“She barely finished her narrative,” the Solomon Family News reported, “when the phone rang a second time.”

This time Gil Solomon picked up the phone. It was the same man with the same request. Gil asked him how he got this phone number. The caller claimed he found it in a listing for “escort services” in the Pacific Bell Yellow Pages. But when Solomon checked his Yellow Pages, he found no such listing. Very suspicious.

The next morning, determined to find out who was harassing his family, Solomon punched *69--the code for returning the most recent incoming call.

“Why did you call my number last night?” Solomon demanded.

“It must have been my roommate,” the man on the other end replied. “I don’t know anything about it.”

He sounded sincere. Solomon decided to have his calls forwarded to his exchange at bedtime. That way, he figured, the crank wouldn’t wake anybody up--and maybe he’d stop. But the calls kept coming.

That’s when the Solomons went to the Los Angeles Police Department. One possibility, he was told, was that their number had been erroneously placed on a flier. The LAPD, working with the Pacific Bell Call Annoyance Bureau, had a two-week “trap” placed on the Solomons’ phone. This technology records data about incoming calls. Sometimes the originating phone number can be identified.

Then one Saturday morning, while her parents were at a softball game, one of the Solomon girls received two very creepy calls within five minutes.

This time the caller made lewd comments. But there was something different. He had a distinctly foreign accent. The previous caller did not. Was it a different man or just somebody playing games?

When Solomon notified Pacific Bell about the suspicious calls, he was told that the time of the call was needed to search the trap. His daughter estimated 11 a.m., but no calls were found.

The two weeks were almost over when Solomon’s exchange reported a message from a man staying in Room 409 at the Sportsmen’s Lodge.

“I figured it was a dead end,” the physician said, “but I called and asked for Room 409.”

A man answered and said, yes, he had placed a call to the Solomons’ number. He was trying to reach an escort listed in the Yellow Pages. He’d even written the number down. It was one of those new, toll-free 888 numbers issued when the telecommunications industry ran out of 800 numbers.

The Yellow Pages didn’t tell him to dial a 1 first--and 888 happened to be the prefix of the Solomons’ home phone. Soon Solomon learned that the 888 escort service was listed in both the East Valley and Westside Yellow Pages, but not in the West Valley.

Curious, Solomon tried the corresponding number in the 310 area code and reached a company that provides oil-field services. Yes, the woman who worked there said, she’d been receiving strange calls too.

When I spoke with the woman later, she told me that because many company phones had the local 888 prefix, wrong numbers had become a common occurrence. Hers was the only one mistaken for an escort service. The question “What are your rates?” became a joke around the office.

She laughed, remembering the caller who announced: “I’ve got a hot poker game going. Could you send over a couple of beautiful dancers?”

Most of the calls came at night and on weekends. People stopped leaving messages, she said, when she began her answer recording with the words: “You have reached the law department of . . . “ The word “law” seemed to have a chilling effect.

The Solomons, meanwhile, were just relieved to discover that they weren’t being harassed, only victimized by a flukish glitch in a world that is becoming more and more digitized.

*

And remember, the Solomons weren’t the only victims. Think of those frustrated men who wound up dialing the wrong number. Being something of a consumer advocate, I called the toll-free number and heard a breathy, feminine voice:

“Thank you for choosing Pilgrim Telephone. Calls cost $2.99 per minute. Welcome to Intimate Connections, where you’ll hear sexy introductions. . . . “

So it isn’t even an escort service! It’s one of those talk-dirty-to-me lines! It’s a bait-and-switch! You call the toll-free number and they ask for your calling card number and charge three bucks a minute. And nobody said anything about satisfaction guaranteed or your money back.

But back to the Solomons. In the end, the family was able to joke about the experience. This was how Solomon Family News ended its report:

“There were only two solutions--change our phone number, or go into the phone sex business. Our new number is--”

No, the Solomons probably don’t want that published.

Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Readers may write to Harris at the Times Valley Edition, 20000 Prairie St., Chatsworth 91311, or via e-mail at scott.harris@latimes.com Please include a phone number.