Prefixation

Dustbury.com's Charles G. Hill has a guest entry over on the Dawn Patrol about Oklahoma City's telephone exchanges. Oklahoma City had some pretty good ones: Shadyside, Swift, Orange, Prospect. Someone had the job of coming up with these names.

For the record, here's what I remember of the Tulsa-area prefixes from 1969, when we moved here:

ADams-4 (far east Tulsa)
AMherst-6 (Catoosa)
CRestview-2 (Owasso)
GEneral
HIckory-5 (west Tulsa)
LUther (downtown)
NAtional-7
RIverside (near the river)
TEmple (near-east Tulsa)

Can't remember the exchange names for Sand Springs, Sapulpa, Sperry, north Tulsa (425 -- was it LAkeview, JAsper, or something else?), or Jenks. Bixby, Bixby North, and Broken Arrow didn't have named
exchanges since they weren't (and aren't) served by Southwestern Bell. (Please e-mail me with additions and corrections.)

The exchange map from the phone book back then is still burned into my brain. Bixby, Bixby North, and BA were shown as solid black shapes separated (out of fellowship?) from the interlocking exchanges of Ma Bell. The next page was the toll chart, warning Catoosa phone subscribers that a call to Sapulpa costs extra.

The first Tulsa exchange without a name, as far as I can recall, was 560, which was used by Cities Service for their headquarters starting in the early '70s. At the same time, the phone book stopped referring to named exchanges and used all-numeric, um, numbers.

On a related note, I have never had a phone number without a zero or a one somewhere in it, which means I've never been able to turn my phone number into a word. My favorite in that category was GARAGES -- the phone number of a garage construction company that advertised on Cubs TV broadcasts (another passion of my Pogo-loving Grandma). Tulsans of a certain age will remember a verbal phone number of ill repute.