Two Longs and a Short

[Weedygarden]

I belong to a South Dakota history group and this story was shared recently. I had never seen or heard it before, but enjoyed this story. I thought some of you would as well. I looked for another thread to share it, with no luck.

https://cryptosmith.com/2017/11/11/...Su-cENa4qCrDcGmth1NMh46JfsV3CmKjc2OPdCfdElZ4g
NOVEMBER 11, 2017CRYPTOSMITH
Two Longs and a Short
By Dick Pence

This story appeared in The Washington Post in 1991, shortly after a computer glitch caused a “long-distance blackout” on the East Coast.
Those big phone outages of the past couple of weeks have had me feeling a bit guilty over what’s been happening. You see, I remember exactly how all this started.
Back in 1950 I was a novice seahand aboard a cruiser based in Philadelphia, barely six months out of high school and fresh from the plains of South Dakota. One Friday night in November, we were granted shore leave at the end of a two-week training cruise. Homesick and seasick, I headed immediately for the row of pay phones that lined the dock.
Depositing a carefully preserved nickel (remember?), I dialed “O.” The following is a roughly verbatim account of what transpired after the Philadelphia operator answered.

“I’d like to place a station-to-station collect call to the Bob Pence residence in Columbia, South Dakota,” I said in my best telephone voice.
The Philadelphia operator was sure she had heard wrong.
“You mean Columbia, South Carolina, don’t you?”
“No, I mean Columbia, South Dakota.” I had tried to call home once before and I was ready for that one.
“Certainly. What is the number, please?” I could tell she still didn’t believe me.
“They don’t have a number,” I mumbled. Like I said, I’d tried to call home before and I knew what was coming.
She was incredulous. “They don’t have a number?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I can’t complete the call without a number. Do you have it?” she demanded.
I didn’t relish being even more of a bumpkin, but I was in the Navy and I knew authority when I heard it.
“Well . . . the only thing I know is . . . TWO LONGS AND A SHORT.”
I think that’s the first time she snorted. “Never mind. I’ll get the number for you. One moment please.”

There followed an audible click and a long period of silence while she apparently first determined if, indeed, there was a Columbia, South Dakota, and then if it was possible to call there. When she returned to the line, she was armed with the not-insignificant knowledge necessary to complete her task.
In deliberate succession, she dialed an operator in Cleveland, asked her to dial one in Chicago, asked Chicago to dial Minneapolis, and Minneapolis to dial Sioux City, Iowa. Sioux City called Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and the operator there dialed one in Aberdeen, South Dakota. At last, Aberdeen dialed the operator in Columbia.
By this time, Philadelphia’s patience was wearing thin, but when Columbia answered, she knew what had to be done.
“The number for the Bob Pence residence, please,” she said, now in control.
Columbia didn’t even hesitate. “That’s two longs and a short,” she declared.
Philadelphia was set back for an instant, but valiantly plowed on. “I have a collect call from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for anyone at that number. Would you please ring?”
“They’re not home,” said Columbia, again not missing a beat.
Philadelphia digested this and decided not to press the issue. Instead, she relayed the message I’d already heard:
“There is no one at that number, sir. Would you like to try again later?”
Columbia quickly interrupted: “Is that you, Dick?”
“Yeah, Margaret. Where are the folks?”
Philadelphia was baffled, but her instincts told her to look out for the company.
“Sir, madam . . . you can’t . . .,” she sputtered.
Margaret ignored her. “They’re up at the school house at the basketball game. Want me to ring?”
I knew I was pushing my luck with Philadelphia, so I said it likely would be too much trouble to get them out of the game.
“No trouble at all,” said Margaret. “It’s halftime.”
Philadelphia made one last effort. Mustering her most official tone, she insisted: “But this is a station-to-station collect call!”
“You just never mind, honey,” said Columbia, “I’ll just put it on Bob’s bill.”
Philadelphia was still protesting when the phone rang and was answered at the school house.
“I have a station-to-station collect call for Bob Pence,” she said, knowing at that instant Ma Bell had somehow been had.
“This is he,” replied my father.
“Go ahead,” whispered an astonished Philadelphia.
I’m glad I couldn’t see her face when I began my end of the conversation in the time-honored fashion of all Mid-Westerners:
“Hi, Dad, it’s me. How’s the weather?”
“Jeez,” said Philadelphia and clicked off.
Here is the confession.
I have a friend who’s retired from AT&T and he insists it was the next Monday morning that the company began to automate its long-distance service.
Now look where we are.

© Copyright 1997 Dick Pence
About the Author
Richard A. “Dick” Pence (1932-2009) wrote this story and and self-published it along with several others in Two Longs and a Short (1997, 2008). A PDF of the book is available from Archive.org by searching for “http://www.pipeline.com/~richardpence/twolongs.htm”
The title story has appeared in more than 150 newspapers and magazines since it was first written about 1984. This version appeared in The Washington Post in 1991, shortly after a computer glitch caused a “long-distance blackout” on the East Coast.
I republish the story here because it has fallen off the Internet. It gives a simple and entertaining look at how phone systems used to work.

 

[kd4ulw]

For a short time my mother was a telephone switchboard operator in Huntington, West Virginia. She also had some stories!

 

[ClemKadiddlehopper]

Two longs and a short (1R) was our closest neighbor's phone #. Ours was three longs and a short (1C).

If you were placing a call from out side the exchange, you would dial the long distance operator and ask for the Sob Lake exchange #1C. To dial from the exchange to the rest of the world, you cranked about a minute to get the operator to give her the number so she could patch you through.

If there was an emergency, you picked up the phone and told 'everyone's' Aunt Bertha there was a fire or whatever. She was always on the line listening in or spreading gossip and it saved lot of time getting the news out.

Trying to phone into the exchange from anywhere but the nearest town 60 miles away, was next to impossible as described above.

Those phones rang in twenty houses and if you missed the start of the pattern, than everyone had to listen to it ring again and again until it was decided that you were probably out back chopping wood or something. Meanwhile ten people were already on the line wanting to know who was calling Jake and was it about something they should know about? I guess that was how the answering machine got started.

 

[Weedygarden]

For a short time my mother was a telephone switchboard operator in Huntington, West Virginia. She also had some stories!

I have an aunt, 90 years old now, who was a telephone operator. One time I was driving from Colorado to North Dakota, through South Dakota and had car trouble, a bad battery. This was before cell phones. I had to place a call to tell the ex that I was having trouble and about connecting to exchange daughter. I had trouble placing the call and I don't remember all the details, but I needed an operator. As I'm telling the operator that I need to call this number, she asks, "Who is this?" I tell her. Well, operators are not supposed to engage with people, even people who might be family. Then she told me who she was, and proceeded to help me make the connection.

 

[kd4ulw]

My mother was a supervisor at an answering service in Louisville. In the mid 80s they moved their office to a new location with modern equipment but they couldn’t switch one doctor’s line for some reason. I wasn’t working so I volunteered to man that old switchboard overnight. I was alone in the abandoned office in a high rise building on a Friday night and stayed up all night without any calls until about 4 am, hospital called to let the doc know his patient that was scheduled for surgery that morning left the hospital. So, I got to wake up the doc and explain what happened. Wish I had a picture of that switchboard with the rotary dial and the one earpiece headset, it was pretty interesting.

 

[Weedygarden]

For a while when I was in college in Kansas City, I worked the switchboard for the college from 4 to 8 at night. I never had anything interesting happen, except that a man who worked in the library, a friend of mine, told me he had called and got cut off. I could have been responsible for that, but I had no idea what he was talking about. I tend to be exacting about some things, and I thought that I was being very careful at that job.

 

[VThillman]

My brother Gordie's widow (Liz) was a switchboard operation for our local phone company in the '40s, starting when she was still in high-school. Two longs and a short was the code for 21.

 

[VThillman]

My brother Gordie's widow (Liz) was a switchboard operation for our local phone company in the '40s, starting when she was still in high-school. Two longs and a short was the code for 21.

The town had about a thousand residents, and the phone system had several branch ("party") lines. My folks were on party line 16, number 4. When you made a call, you had to go through the operator unless you wanted to talk to someone on your party line.

 

[billyjack]

I first saw this story years ago. Someone asked me about it earlier tonight so a web search led me to this forum.

We didn't get a telephone until I was in high school. Before that, we went over to my grandmother's house across the field. She originally had one of the old crank phones on the wall, but by the time I knew what a phone was, they had upgraded to a desk phone.

Her phone was on a party line. My aunt was on the same party line. They used to listen in on each other's phone calls.

Also, if you called someone long distance, the operator would come on the line and ask for the number that you were calling from. That continued into the 1990s.