Old Phones.
This is sorta how everyones phone looked like when I was
a growing up in the Burg. Many folks might have had a
wall phone in the kitchen which was also black like this.
Often there were a bunch of notes around the wall phone
in the kitchen of numbers frequently called.. family,
friends, Dads work, favorite food places..there might be
coupons from local food places there too.
I can remember barely my Mom and Dad talking about phone
numbers old style...when phone numbers began with words
for some reason... I remember an LY number and a few
EXPORT numbers. I found a site on the net about old
phone number words.. here is what it said about a few
local places I found:
JUNiper 58
Owen 69
Tuxedo 88
Export 39
Trenton 87 (replaced by Export)
Lyric 59
Twin Oaks 89 (Lawrenceville)
Axtel, Axminster 29 (bordentown)
Princeton 77 (princeton)
Walnut 1 or 4 (princeton)
Note: Princeton had 4-digit numbers in the early 1950s
according to a poster on that site:)
2 comments:
According to a friend of mine who was a Trenton history buff (insane trivia and weird stuff too) ..
The oldest number in Trenton ... or first number .... was that of the Scott Taylor Pharmacy when they were down town near State & Broad and they were simply .... #1 .....
They are now on the corner of Brunswick and Spruce where the old pharmacy was run by Harrison Harbourt. Harrison was a member of the old Delaware Valley Sports Car Club and had a wicked nice Mercedes 230 roadster ... about a 1965 or so.
My family had one of those old black rotary phones. The receiver weighed a ton, like it was made of lead. The rotary was metal. No plastic dial! For Christmas one year, we gave my parents a cordless phone. I thought great! We don't have to get up everytime the phone rang. We could have the receiver in the kitchen. So I replaced the old phone and plugged in , (the four prong jack) the cordless. Two days later my father had me put the old phone back in. He said he was picking up a neighbor's conversations a couple of houses down and was hearing the truckers CB's driving by on Hamilton Ave. Progress moved s l o w l y...in my home.
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