Six Six One Doesn’t Have That Familiar Ring

Eight Oh Five.

Call it an area code or call it a lifestyle--but whatever you call it, call it soon.

For our classic California triad is being eroded as surely as our beaches are being gobbled up by the Pacific.

For now, you and I are still Eight Oh Fivers. But beware; just last Saturday, a few hundred of our brothers and sisters in a remote sliver of Ventura County’s back country were snatched away into the new Six Six One area code.

And they won’t be coming back.

*

Eight Oh Five was one of the few things--maybe the only thing--that bound everyone in Ventura County together.

Oh sure, nobody wants the place to become the sprawling mess usually referred to as “another San Fernando Valley.” But it’s tough to build a decent relationship based on what you hate instead of what you love. It’s like a couple drawn to each other because neither can stand the smell of boiling ammonia.

The rancher in Fillmore, the registered nurse in Simi Valley and the writer in Ventura might not have much else in common, but at least we’d always have our old friend, Eight Oh Five. Or so we thought.

Centuries before the installation of Ventura County’s first telephone, a Chumash elder stood atop Mt. Pinos, gazed up at the circling condors, and in a strange tongue declared: Eight Oh Five. Nobody had the slightest idea what he was talking about.

Even so, the message was passed on to Padre Serra’s monks and then to the Spanish land barons and on to the early lima-bean farmers: Eight Oh Five. At one point, the Beach Boys toyed with a song called “Eight Oh Five” because the numbers smelled of sizzling hot dogs and salt air at twilight.

Finally, Eight Oh Five took its rightful place as our area code.

Coincidence?

*

Joe Cocke knows better.

He’s one of us. He’s an Eight Oh Fiver. He lives in Thousand Oaks and retired a few years ago from his executive position there with GTE.

But that didn’t stop him from ripping a small, sparsely populated portion of Ventura County from Eight Oh Five and plunking it into Six Six One, where it will rub shoulders with the likes of Lancaster and Weedpatch.

In truth, Joe is a nice guy with a tough job. He’s the senior area code relief planner with the North American Numbering Plan Administration. That means he studies the expansion possibilities for every area code west of Texas, including Alaska (907) and Hawaii (808).

When the signs are right, he and his brethren ask state public utilities commissions for approval.

He told me it’s been clear for some time that old Eight Oh Five was ready to burst.

“It’s a great place to live,” he said. “So there’s population growth and new businesses, and businesses expanding. Combine that with the wonderful toys that our California population enjoys: pagers, cell phones, extra lines for every family member, plus Internet access, plus telecommuting . . . “

On top of all that, phone companies big and small buy blocks of 10,000 numbers at a time for possible use down the road. So it’s little wonder that area codes in California have zoomed from 13 in 1997 to 24 today or that old Eight Oh Five is due for a much more serious shake-up as soon as 2001.

Nobody knows just what that will be. Maybe the Tri-County area it now covers will be sliced like a pizza. Or maybe new residents will receive a new area code, raising the horrifying specter of next-door neighbors with different area codes, or even of different codes within the same house. In either event, we would routinely dial 10 digits for a local call instead of the God-given seven. There’s something wrong with that.

*

The new Six Six One covers all of Kern County, northern Los Angeles County, and shreds of Ventura and Santa Barbara counties. We’ll adjust to it, I suppose. The reality is that the ranchers and retirees of the rugged Lockwood Valley have much more in common with Kern County than they ever did with Ventura.

Cocke couldn’t say why Six Six One was selected instead of some other number. However, he said such decisions are made without fear or favor. The North American Numbering Council squelched Nevada’s bid for an area code consisting of three 7s, he pointed out; if you can’t come up with an unbiased area code, you might as well quit the business.

I say: It wouldn’t be California if Californians couldn’t create their own area codes.

If you want an 888 area code--eight signifies prosperity to the Chinese--go for it. If you’re at the mercy of egomania and need every device in the house to declare One One One, you should be able to do just that by paying a premium. If you want the cachet of 310--the West L.A. area code that means you order in Japanese at a sushi bar--there should be some technology around that allows you to have it.

Likewise if you choose to stay in old Eight Oh Five and spend the rest of your days with Eight Oh Five phones in every room, Eight Oh Five pagers on every belt loop and Eight Oh Five cell phones in every pocket. Let freedom ring.

*

Steve Chawkins is a Times staff writer. His e-mail address is steve.chawkins@latimes.com.