In the old days, you could ring up your neighbors in a
jiffy to chat about the latest goings on in town.
More than seventy years ago, local numbers had just three
digits instead of today’s seven, and Beaumont’s portion of the phone book was a
whopping 2 ½ pages long.
Many farmers, ranchers, and merchants knew important
numbers by heart and often dialed:
• 844 for Dr. Howard A. Wood
• 656 for M & M Market
• 501 for Armstrong Dairy.
• 832 for Cox Seed and Feed
• 332 for Stewart Ranch
• 363 for Union Ice Co.
• 722 for Zook Hospital
Calling
up history
As we flip through the 1939 Telephone Directory that
belonged to former mayor Guy Bogart, it reveals a snapshot in time. He
underlined important numbers like Annis Drug Co., the Justice of the Peace,
City Hall, and names like F.S. Hirsch, Bill Hale, and W.C. Sutter. This harkens
to a bygone era in Beaumont, when agriculture was king and you could set your
watch by the passenger trains arriving at the depot.
(Bogart’s vintage telephone book, preserved by the San
Gorgonio Pass Historical Society, is a window into the days before push-button
phones, texting, voice mail, and Skype. In those days, you dialed 696 for the
Fire and Police departments and 01 for long distance. The pamphlet-sized
directory with 71 pages covered a dozen communities, including Banning,
Beaumont, Elsinore, Hemet, Moreno, Murrieta, Palm Springs, Perris, San Jacinto,
Temecula and Twenty-Nine Palms.)
Party
lines and Person-to-Person
Inside the phone book, there’s a half-page advertisement
on the back cover for typewriters. For $5, you could rent one for two months.
Or if you’re horse needed shoeing, you could call a blacksmith in neighboring
Banning.
Back in a time when there were “Party Lines,” and
“Person-to-Person” calls, staying in touch cost a lot more. In the late 1930s,
a three-minute daytime call between Beaumont and Los Angeles cost 70 cents,
including federal tax. (With a “party line,” several families shared the same
line. A “Person-to-Person” call was where the operator dialed a number, asked
for a specific person and you were connected only if that person answered.)
And while this might seem like a long time ago,
especially today when the phone book for just the Pass itself stretches to more
than 400 pages, it’s a reminder about where we’ve been and where we’re headed.
In our region, progress and even better days are always just ahead.
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