MovieChat Forums > BUtterfield 8 (1960) Discussion > 'I Love Lucy' can help you...

'I Love Lucy' can help you...

posted 14 years ago by nycruise-1
2 replies | jump to latest

...understand how exchanges like "BUtterfield 8" were common in the 1950s and early 60s.

On many occasions when Lucy makes a call, she will ask the operator for the number giving the exchange version "MUrray Hill X-XXXX" for example.

I think the one most commonly used in the series (which may have been fictitious) is "CIrcle X" - in particular, a "CIrcle" phone number is listed as the contact info in the episode where Ethel appears on TV as "Mary Margaret McMertz" hawking "Aunt Martha's Old Fashioned Salad Dressing."

We lived in SoCal back then - the exchange at the time for our own section of the San Gabriel Valley was "PArkview" - which translated to "72" + "2" for the local area prefix.

I believe the reason for these named exchanges was that the phone lines all emanated from the same local circuit center, sort of like today's computers on a client server. And so the exchange centers were named according to the telephone company's protocol (whatever that was - perhaps geographic as in "MUrray Hill" or "AStoria Station" in NYC - which is a real neighborhood, but, then again, perhaps not, as in my case where "PArkview" in the LA metro area did not relate to any known neighborhood).

This was all back in the days before cellphones and more advanced circuitry/technology allowed for the phone lines to travel over wireless networks.

Back then, there was only ONE phone company - Bell Telephone (there were others but they were very, very localized) - and because of the way the circuitry worked and the phone company plans with cheap rates, there were also things known as "party lines" which meant that you shared your phone line with another party (or more?), in which case if you picked up the phone there was the possibility that the line was already in use (you could hear the people talking, and you were at your discretion to either hang up or ask them to get off in the event that you had an emergency to take care of. "I Love Lucy" addresses this issue too, in the episode where Lucy is waiting to receive a phone call from a game show but her party line turns out to be in use by two gossipy New York housewives; when the chatters ignore Lucy's plea that she has an emergency, she thinks up a quick "Lucy" scheme in order to free the line up!

"Don't call me 'honey', mac."
"Don't call me 'mac'... HONEY!"

[–] don-lockwood 14 years ago

Great post. I love I Love Lucy, and too bad I couldn't love this film.

[–] skiddoo 14 years ago

That sort of arrangement went out the window when the suburbs were built. The suburbs got the new technology right from the start, leaving the cities and small towns awhile longer to their party lines and old-fashioned systems. The first phone number I remember, some time around when this movie was made, had a name in it but it wasn't a party line--I don't know if we paid more for privacy or if there weren't other choices there. I can't imagine my father putting up with a party line if he could avoid it! lol

That was in Cook County, far enough out from Chicago to have farmland around it but people still commuted in by train. Inside of five years all the farmland was under houses and everyone had all numbers on their phones, which in another few years were push button and new lines put into homes used phone jacks, and then you didn't lease the phone so you brought it with you to the next place you lived where it didn't match the decor. :) And the revolution was on.

But my sister's in-laws in a tiny town in upstate NY had four digit numbers well into the 70s with their phone company. I'd never heard of such a thing and was very much surprised. With the breakup of Bell even wide places in the road like that could get standardized service. You couldn't chooose MCI or whatever without standardization.

It would seem that Lucy's not dialing the number herself would be harking back to dialless phones when you necessarily had to ask the operator for help in connecting you. Was that still the case in NYC in the early 50s or was it held over as a plot device? Or was she calling Information and asking to be connected to the party the operator looked up for her? (I believe she would still have needed the operator for long distance to get into the system in another part of the country via their operator, before the area code method.)

Does anyone recall if she had a rotary phone? She might have had an old-fashioned phone in an apartment building as down-market as that one. But then people did keep asking for expensive operator assistance out of habit until repeatedly told in that professionally-polite way that operators used to have, "You can dial that yourself, Ma'am/Sir." :)

In Butterfield 8 that number seems to have been an answering service she hired. I gather getting a service in a higher class area would be like getting a business mail drop box in a wealthier part of town.