Brief by Central Staff
Local lore – April 2002 – Colorado Central Magazine
When he was about 10 years old, our publisher learned pi to 32 places (3.14159265358979…), thereby impressing his teachers and starting a lifetime habit of accumulating rather useless information. Since then, alas, he seems to have developed a mild case of numeric dyslexia.
The most recent victim is Suzanne MacDonald, who used to own Creekside Books in Buena Vista. She sold the store a few years ago and went to law school in Denver. Now she’s back in Buena Vista with her own law office, and like all enlightened entrepreneurs, she purchased an advertisement in this magazine.
The first proof went to her; it had her office phone with the Salida prefix of 539 rather than the Buena Vista prefix of 395 — Ed’s excuse is that they’re the same three digits, and sometimes the fingers take over from the brain at the keyboard.
She called with the correction. Ed thought he fixed that, but it ended up in print in the March edition as 359, another transposition. For the record, her office number is 719-395-9236.
This isn’t the first time he’s made this mistake. He put a 539 on a Creekside Books ad back in 1994. Back in 1982 or so, he went to call the Buena Vista chamber, mistakenly put 539 on it instead of 395, and discovered an unlisted telephone company time-of-day message (which no longer operates — today’s Qwest doesn’t give away anything, including the time).
But as long as we’re going back in time, we might eliminate some of these mistakes by returning to the old method of listing telephone numbers — with an exchange name.
It’s a lot easier to confuse 395 and 539 than it is to confuse EXport 5 and KEystone 9, which is how the Buena Vista and Salida exchanges were known until the 1960s, when the Bell System moved to all digits for several reasons — among then, more possibilities in the first two digits since 0 and 1 have no letters, and consistent typography with the arrival of area codes and direct distance dialing.
(Nowadays, some marketing uses the letters to spell whole words, as with 1-800-COLLECT, but that’s a different matter.)
There’s not a lot of history about exchange names; the telephone companies apparently began by naming them after nearby streets or neighborhoods, and then expanded as necessary. But they have entered American lore, as with the Glenn Miller song “PEnnsylvania 6-5000” and the Elizabeth Taylor movie “BUtterfield 8.”
These things stay with you — Ed remembers Greeley’s ELgin well, just as Martha recalls the REpublic of Utica, Mich. And of course, there’s a relevant web site: www.ourwebhome.com/TENP/TENproject.html
It has a searchable archive, so we checked for other area towns, and learned that Saguache was OLympic 5, Alamosa was JUniper 9, and Cañon City was CRestwood 5. There were no entries for Leadville, Fairplay, Gunnison, or Westcliffe.
A few towns may have lacked exchange names because they didn’t get dial phones until after the phone company switched to all numbers.
When did that happen? A Salida city directory of 1961 has ads with KEystone 9 and KE 9 phone numbers; by 1963 they were all 539. The 1963 Salida Mountain Bell directory (also Fairplay and Buena Vista, and there were 40 pages all told) uses 539 for Salida and 395 for Buena Vista, but Fairplay numbers are of the pre-dialing variety: 29 for the newspaper, 48 for the hotel, 08-J1 for a Jefferson store, 03-R2 for a Como residence, etc.
(Ed can remember a grade-school assembly when dial phones arrived in Greeley and Evans — he asked why there wasn’t a Q on the dial — and thinking it was a big step backward, since looking up a number and dialing it with stubby little fingers was difficult compared to just picking up the phone and telling the operator he wanted to talk to Billy Potter or Dick Ziegler. Though phone customers had numbers then, they were short, and the operator would often handle calls by name.)
In 1978 when we arrived in Salida, customers making local calls didn’t have to dial the whole 3-digit prefix, they only needed to dial the last number in the prefix — 9 rather than 539 — along with the 4-digit number, as with 9-5345 for our office.
Leadville apparently got dial phones fairly early, as nearly as we can tell. A helpful librarian there checked some old phone directories, and found that in the six-page 1923 directory, phone users were advised to dial 22, followed by the 5-digit number in the directory, as with 22-312-14 for a plumber.
But none of us had time to go through the directories and learn when that 22 turned into something like HUnter 6 (the current prefix is 486), if it ever did.
As for the website, it has a list of exchange names suggested by AT&T back then, and so if you’re retro-minded, you could use SUnset 3 for a Westcliffe number, MIdway 1 for Gunnison, or WHitehall 2 in greater Texas Creek. And we’re at KEystone 9-5345.