Telephone number???

Does anyone know the Cleaver's telephone number? It's getting to me.

Help!

Thanks!

[dw]

The Cleaver's telephone number was KL5-4763.

[collins]

Originally posted by dw:
The Cleaver's telephone number was KL5-4763.

also, when beaver won the sports car, i remember ward reviewing the classified ad saying "whitney-2798".

[Dude111]

Wow are you sure that was the #?

Thats a 555 # right??

There must have been a REAL number going to that house,anyone know that??

[stevea]

KL5-4763 was their phone number. Back in the day they purposely used numbers that weren't real, in case viewers called them. That KLondike exchange was often used.

The Whitney number wasn't real, either--not enough digits.

In another episode June was concerned about a number she found on a piece of paper in Wally's jacket. It was probably a real number because TV Land blurred it.

[Dude111]

Ya pretty stupid as that # probably doesnt exist anymore!!

[Yong Fang]

Can anyone explain the old timey phone numbers like "Klondike5543?" How did that work? The last series who used that was All in the Family in the early 1970's, but that was obsolete by then.

How does this work?

[stevea]

Originally Posted by Yong Fang

Can anyone explain the old timey phone numbers like "Klondike5543?" How did that work? The last series who used that was All in the Family in the early 1970's, but that was obsolete by then.

How does this work?

The ones I'm familiar with are named telephone exchanges, the first two letters of which are dialed with a third number, and the customer's individual four digit number. Total dialed number is seven digits. Examples:

OLive 4-4007, WAlnut 3-1212, CLifford 5-1223. I'm not familiar with examples where a number is omitted, like Whitney 2798, so I don't know how those would work.

The New York City exchange names hung on for a long time.

[GentlemanJim]

A typical named exchange was good for about 10,000 phone numbers, so as communities outgrew that limitation, distributed exchanges located in various parts of the city, with geographically significant names became a popular solution.

For instance if your number was HArrison-2345 the location of the distributed switch that you were connected to, might very well have been in a satellite building the phone company had on HArrison Street.

And as needs continued to grow, multiple switch panels were often placed in these satellite buildings such that if your number was HArrison 7-2345, then you likely were connected through panel 7 in the HArrison street satellite facility

[stevea]

Makes sense--WAlnut is Indianapolis probably expanded gradually--WA 3, 4, 5, 6, etc. A tiny town in New Jersey was just OLive 4. Panel 4 designation might have been used, since maybe OKlahoma 2 and OLio 3 were in other towns.

[Stepperry40]

Did movies and TV shows use KLondike 5 4763 or KLondyke 5 5763 because if the filmed in Hollywood or anywhere else in the US was KL5- 555 during the 1950s there were still 5 & 6 number exchanges. Except for San Francisco and Columbus, Ohio that used KLondike, Ex: Kilgore 8180 is a five pull (1L-4N) or ARthur 6022 is a six pull (2N-4N) or actual examples Kenmore 9293 in Fort Wayne, Indiana or MArket 7032 phased out c 1960. Would that give you any indication of what city or state they might have been living in when Beaver & his friend called to Los Angeles to talk too Don Drysdale?

[GentlemanJim]

Originally Posted by Stepperry40

Would that give you any indication of what city or state they might have been living in when Beaver & his friend called to Los Angeles to talk too Don Drysdale?

I barely remember the implementation of "direct distance dialing" ( 1+area code+ 7 digit) so the following is mostly opinion, but I don't believe there was much effort put into coordination of exchange names between various cities. You might have "Lafayette" in several cities, just as one example. There used to be quite a few smaller telcos before consolidation.

One would likely have to be personally familiar with a particular location for the names to be meaningful. I'm sure there were outliers...but unless one already knew that, the info would be meaningless

[stevea]

In Indianapolis, they were: CLifford, AXminster, FLeetwood, LIberty, MElrose, STate, TRinity, TWinbrook, WEstwood, and WAlnut. A couple of suburban ones I remember were VIctor and TUrner. None of these had any local connection.

[Torgo]

I liked in the Andrew Dice Clay movie The Adventures Of Ford Fairlane, they poked fun at the 555 prefix:

Ford Fairlane: "Hey, look. Write down my number: 555-6321 Got it?"

Twin Club Girl: "Yeah. Wait a minute. 555 is not a real number. They only use that in the movies."

Ford Fairlane: "No ****, honey. What do you think this is? Real life?"

[GentlemanJim]

And, who can forget "For a good time call Mount Pilot 3791"? .....