Submitted by Pete Norgeot
The telephone office in Orleans, when I was a kid, was right on Main Street. It wasn't the original place though. H.K. Cummings opened the first one. There is more on HK Cummings. We are so spoiled now. We can tell our phone to make a call and it makes it. We couldn't always do that. We couldn't always just "ring" up a number even if we knew it. 411 hadn't been invented or at least hadn't made it this far east yet. We just picked up the phone handset (which was hard-wired in with a short cord) and when an operator said "number please" we just told him/her who we wanted to call. That worked out well for local calls because the operators knew everyone in town, and what their numbers were.....not so much for folks who lived out of town, that required more operators. Those same operators always knew who you were and they didn't always ask for "number please", sometimes they wanted to chat a bit, then they would complete your call. (I guess it got quite boring sitting there when no one was making calls.) BTW - A lot of calls were just to the operators when people knew their schedule.(girl-friends, Moms, other?) There was one operator that you didn't mess with. Hollis Eldredge. (his wife was my 1st grade teacher) Hollis was the only male operator I was ever aware of. All business. As kids we could joke with the female operators (mostly High School girls or somebody's mom we knew) but not Hollis. He knew who we were and he knew our parents. Then, in a spurt of what they called progress, somebody invented dial phones, putting most of the operators out of work. They still needed some because I don't think they had invented phone books yet.....at least they weren't widely distributed. People just dialed "0" and got their information. (Operators were the old-town versions of Wikipedia - all-knowing.....mostly.) "Modern" phones couldn't dial most existing local numbers (remember there were "private" lines and "party lines" and the "party" lines had up to four households on that one line so you had to wait for your neighbor to finish gossiping in order to make your call - or to get one). Those numbers were of random length. The "party" lines were designated by a hyphen and a digit like 232m-1 (this was our phone number before "modernization") Not much way a dial phone could handle all that. So they created a uniform numbering system which the "modern" phones could handle.....ain't progress great. Once "modernized", you had a 7 digit number.....they hadn't invented area codes yet - the operators still had to help you make "long distance" calls. Our new number was CL5-0473. The exchange in Orleans was Clearwater5 but you only had to dial the first 2 letters plus "5" plus "0473" if you wanted to call me. It wasn't until a couple decades ago that you had to include the new area codes. BTW - in case you were wondering, the poor people (us) had the "party" lines. We couldn't afford a "private" line. Below is a short table showing the "original" exchanges in various towns as near as I can remember. If I have any/many wrong let me know. If you know some I don't have please let me know.| Town | Old Exchange | New Exchange |
|---|---|---|
| Barnstable | FOrest2 | 362 |
| Bourne | PLaza9 | 759 |
| Brewster | TWinoaks6 | 896 |
| Falmouth | KImball8 | 548 |
| Harwich | GEneva2 | 432 |
| Hyannis | SPring5 | 775 |
| Mashpee | GRanite7 | 477 |
| Orleans | CLearwater5 | 255 |
| Osterville | GArden8 | 428 |
| Provincetown | HUbbard7 | 487 |
| South Yarmouth | EXeter8 | 398 |
| Wellfleet | FIeldbrook9 | 349 |