Remember Beechwood 4-5789?

When I was growing up, there was no such thing as an area code. The first telephone I remember didn’t even have a rotary dial. We lived in a rural area and even though the rotary had been introduced in 1923, our phone didn’t have one. To make a call, all we did was pick up the receiver and a woman would come on saying “Number, please?”

Before there were area codes, there were prefixes. A prefix, though, was a personal thing: It was a name, not a number. My family lived in the West San Fernando Valley where the prefix was “State,” our number being State 4-0792. Los Angeles was a city with room for lots of prefixes; some that I remember were Dunkirk, Richmond, Prospect, Madison, Orange and, of course, Hollywood.

Some time in the ‘40s, a man from the phone company showed up at our door to install a telephone with a rotary dial. Imagine the convenience: We no longer had to go through an operator but could dial whoever we wanted on our own. What power, what freedom. Our prefix was still State, but numbers on the dial were assigned to certain letters, and the first two letters of the prefix would be dialed as a part of the number.

I’ve always missed the prefix. The names added a personal flavor bare numbers couldn’t begin to match. Even the phone company would have to admit “Hollywood 5-0723” loses much of its magic when translated into “213-465-0723.”

But the rotary dial didn’t give complete freedom. If you wanted to call to another city, you still dialed the operator and she (it was always a she) would make the connection.

My wife was one of those operators. She had a job with the phone company in the early ‘50s. Still a junior in high school, she worked evenings and weekends as a long-distance operator.

Only a child when she hired on, she was one of more than 100 women who occupied the barn-like building at Seventh and Rampart, sitting side by side before a huge switchboard, plugging phone jacks into flashing lights to coordinate long-distance calls.

She forgets exactly what the company name was. It might have been Pacific Tel-and-Tel or it might have been Bell Systems, but it doesn’t matter, they were all the same. There was only one phone company then and it was “the Phone Company.” In the 1970s, comedienne Lily Tomlin did a routine of a phone operator explaining to an irate customer that “This is the phone company, sir, we’re omnipotent.” The line needed no explanation.

But how things have changed. The switchboard operator job my wife used to have is gone, evaporated into progress, all done by computers now. The phone company’s monopoly too has changed, with dozens of companies now competing for long-distance business. Two phone bills come each month now, each about the same size as the one bill I used to get.

I’m sitting in a motel room using a phone card to call home and let the wife know I made it OK. Punching in 24 digits in proper sequence at the direction of a recorded message, I think of how it was just 60 short years ago, when picking up the receiver would bring a soft voice on the line saying, “Number, please?”

Jon Love lives in Visalia.