Lorain Telephone Company Exchange Names

Back on November 13, I posted a Lorain Telephone Company ad from November 1956 (shown at left).

The ad presented a suggestion for remembering the new phone numbers made up of two letters and five numbers. The suggestion was to add a mental pause before the last four numbers.

The example used in the ad was WOodland 1 - 9120.

I remarked that our two-letter prefix was AVenue.

My old Masson School classmate Mike Kozlowski remembered seeing ATlantic on his phone, which brought up a good question as to how the Lorain Telephone Company assigned these word prefixes.

So I went back to the Lorain Public Library to review some telephone books for the answer.

It appears that those little phone company buildings that are still seen around Lorain and the surrounding communities were associated with a specific telephone exchange.

Here’s the map that appeared on the front of the 1956 phone book, showing all of the various exchanges.

I think it would have been cool to have ‘Yukon’ as an exchange – as opposed to the more humdrum ‘Avenue.’

The 1956 book included a smaller map inside explaining how exchange areas could have five different exchanges (like Lorain) or just one (like Vermilion). I guess it was a geographic thing.

A post I did on a November 1963 Lorain Telephone Company ad included a map showing the various exchanges and their buildings.

By 1968, the various exchange names were dropped and replaced by their corresponding numbers. Here’s the map from that 1968 edition.

Looking back, I think those old exchange names had a quaint charm to them. Sometimes one could be dramatic as well, (such as the use of one in the title of the 1948 movie, Call Northside 777).

The passing of those telephone exchange names is one of those cultural changes, along with the elimination of home milk delivery, that helped signal the beginning of the modern era.