The era of landline telephones - question about billing

[gunhilltrain]

I'm starting to forget what it was like before everyone had smartphones. All right, to simplify the plot question to the basics: it's 1969, and I have a young guy who is having an illicit affair with a woman in another state. (New York and New Jersey, so it's not that far.) He wants to call his girlfriend over there, but he doesn't want to the name of her town to show up on the phone bill. It's not his account, and he doesn't want the other people in his residence, one of whom pays the bill, to see that information.

I assume he could call collect, and the town name would thus not be on the bill. (Do people even call collect anymore?) Do I understand correctly how that used to be billed? I don't think I need to give more details about why he is trying to hide this, but I guess that was an issue in some households. (No, it's not his wife he's trying to bypass, but that's an example of such a situation.)

 

[Emotional]

Yes you are correct.

Local calls weren't listed on the bill, but all long distance calls were, time and length.

Also after 10 pm the rates fell.

Outgoing collect calls never showed up on the bill

Yeah, I am old.

 

[XerXesXu]

I'm starting to forget what it was like before everyone had smartphones. All right, to simplify the plot question to the basics: it's 1969, and I have a young guy who is having an illicit affair with a woman in another state. (New York and New Jersey, so it's not that far.) He wants to call his girlfriend over there, but he doesn't want to the name of her town to show up on the phone bill. It's not his account, and he doesn't want the other people in his residence, one of whom pays the bill, to see that information.

I assume he could call collect, and the town name would thus not be on the bill. (Do people even call collect anymore?) Do I understand correctly how that used to be billed? I don't think I need to give more details about why he is trying to hide this, but I guess that was an issue in some households. (No, it's not his wife he's trying to bypass, but that's an example of such a situation.)

Could he not use public call boxes where he lives?

 

[Voboy]

Yeah. He'd use a payphone.

That's why crooks use payphones in movies.

 

[MrPixel]

Also note that calls that would be considered "local" today were not back then. Local calling zones were very small in many areas. The example I grew up with was 942- and 948- prefixes were local, but 947- was over the city line six miles away and would show up on the bill, and billed per minute.

I second the payphone being the method of choice back then, but better have a buttload of change ready on the little shelf in the booth.

 

[Carnevil9]

I'm an old fart, and remember that era well. The one thing that sticks in my mind is that the rules varied from town to town, and from year to year.

I think you'd be safe making up whatever billing rules work for your story, and nobody currently alive would take issue with it.

 

[PennameWombat]

Also note that calls that would be considered "local" today were not back then. Local calling zones were very small in many areas. The example I grew up with was 942- and 948- prefixes were local, but 947- was over the city line six miles away and would show up on the bill, and billed per minute.

The entire state I was born in was a single area code (it’s been split since my youth), but not all calls within that code were local. It went by prefixes (the first three digits), but I have no memory of where the ‘border’ was.

I was in, I think, in junior high school when we finally switched from the party line to an individual phone line.

When my mother passed away years ago, she still had the wall-mounted rotary dial phone that’d been there since I’d been a child. It was still ‘rented.’ Trust me, the phone company insisted on retrieving the phone when my sister informed them my mother had passed away to cancel the account.

I second the payphone being the method of choice back then, but better have a buttload of change ready on the little shelf in the booth.

My memory is way rusty, but so far as i recall, if you did a collect call from a pay phone you only needed the coin to initiate the call and not coins to keep the call going. I don’t remember if you got the coin back when the call was accepted. But I agree the pay phone would’ve been the ’best’ option for the scenario. Since the call recipient would be okay with accepting a collect call made from her lover’s residence (the OP’s scenario), seems accepting one from a pay phone would be fine too. Of course, that assumes it’s set somewhere that pay phones were relatively common.

1969 might’ve been a bit early, but phreakers in the 1970s had devices that made the appropriate ‘tone’ for a coin dropping and could use those in many cases with pay phones. There were also such tricks that could work with home phones of the times.

 

[Rustyoznail]

I second the payphone being the method of choice back then, but better have a buttload of change ready on the little shelf in the booth.

"… And the operator says 40 cents more
For the next three minutes..."

Ah, old songs save the day

 

[jsmiam]

Agreed. Price might be a factor, if you’re going so far as addressing the details. People didn’t talk endlessly.

Collect calls costed more than dialing yourself too once self dialing became the thing.

And in the back of your mind you couldn’t be entirely certain the operator wasn’t listening.

And party lines. You might have been subject to the other household sharing the line picking up. But also agreed, you may need more research from phone people to know exactly the state of things in 1969. not hard to find though. Google “telephony forum”, find one that seems friendly, and be prepared to have your ear talked off

I was just computers, but I worked in a phone company and when you got the technicians talking about the old days and customer horror stories and falling off poles and who was shocked by the most electricity, it was always fascinating.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

Would the classic trick of phoning, letting the phone ring 3 times, and hanging up, as a code to let the recipient know to call or or all was ok, work?

In the UK, calling collect (a 'reverse charge call') cost about 3x the normal call rate, though the recipient could hear both you and the operator, so it was possible to gabble 'Dad, pick me up at 9 at Salford station' while the operator was saying "I have a reverse-charge call from Name. Do you accept the charges?" And then there'd be a "I most certainly do not! (yeah Salford at 9)" before the phone was slammed down.

Phone boxes (booths, in America?) were everywhere. As long as the caller had an excuse to be out that house, that would likely be the obvious solution.

 

[PennameWombat]

Would the classic trick of phoning, letting the phone ring 3 times, and hanging up, as a code to let the recipient know to call or or all was ok, work?

In the UK, calling collect (a 'reverse charge call') cost about 3x the normal call rate, though the recipient could hear both you and the operator, so it was possible to gabble 'Dad, pick me up at 9 at Salford station' while the operator was saying "I have a reverse-charge call from Name. Do you accept the charges?" And then there'd be a "I most certainly do not! (yeah Salford at 9)" before the phone was slammed down.

Same trick worked and was often employed in the US. I guess it would still work, if you can find one of the tiny number of remaining pay phones.

All operator-assisted calls in the US were higher charges, even normal long-distance calls. The phrase “direct dial” I recall appearing at some point when I was very young. If you direct-dialed a long-distance call it was cheaper than going through the operator, whether it was collect/reverse or not.

Phone boxes (booths, in America?) were everywhere. As long as the caller had an excuse to be out that house, that would likely be the obvious solution.

Where I grew up, the only fully enclosed phone booths I ever saw were on television. The public pay phones were usually on the sides or inner walls of buildings and covered by a hooded enclosure that somewhat protected the phone. It had two sides that extended about two feet below the phone, but rarely reached the ground. It seemed designed to offer some protection to the phone but not much to the user and definitely offered no privacy if anyone were near.

 

[Rustyoznail]

This site could be useful.
https://www.payphone-project.com/numbers/usa/NY/

 

[MrPixel]

1969 might’ve been a bit early, but phreakers in the 1970s had devices that made the appropriate ‘tone’ for a coin dropping and could use those in many cases with pay phones. There were also such tricks that could work with home phones of the times.

"Phreaking", "Crunching" and "blue boxes". From Wikipedia:

In the 1960s Cap'n Crunch cereal boxes came with whistles which coincidentally had the specific frequency required to exploit a vulnerability of in-band signaling enabling a phone to make free calls by entering an 'operator mode'. This was discovered by John Draper.

The whistles were a plastic bosun's whistle that would do the high/low tones. Playing both tones together was what fooled the phone circuits. The John Draper link is informative.

"Blue boxes" gave the user full access to the telcom switching system and would bypass the billing circuits. Steve Jobs made a few bucks out of his garage selling blue boxes right before building the Apple I.

To answer the now-burning question, no, I didn't. I was an electronics geek at the time and conversant in the circuits and techniques, but I had no motivation to hack the system. Who was I going to call?

 

[MrPixel]

Where I grew up, the only fully enclosed phone booths I ever saw were on television. The public pay phones were usually on the sides of buildings and covered by a hooded enclosure that somewhat protected the phone.

Those "mini booths" were optimistically designed to also serve as drive-up phones. Where I grew up you would find them on parking lots. They were actually a later development; I don't recall seeing any until the '70s, but it could also be that I lived in an area served by GTE (General Telephone & Electronics), sort of a red-headed stepchild in the industry.

EDIT: The drive-up booths were notorious for missing handsets. People would yank the cord out of the phone box. Strangely, it was rarely a bare cord hanging there, the weak end was the attachment to the box.

The fully-enclosed booths were everywhere where I lived. I recall the folding doors disappearing roughly 1980 as cases of malicious entrapment came to light. This was possibly spawned by a scene in a thriller movie where this was portrayed.

 

[MrPixel]

And then there's the Jim Croce song, which sort of captured the payphone experience.

 

[BobbyBrandt]

Ma Bell (AT&T) still held the monopoly on long distance calls in 1969 across the USA. There were multiple "Baby Bells" that controlled the lines within their own territories, but paid Ma Bell to route calls between them.

A couple of alligator clips, a telephone with a few feet of cord attached, and remedial knowledge of telephone circuitry would allow your character to tap into the phone line of one of his neighbors so that the long distance calls would appear on their bill instead of his home. Imagine that his next door neighbor's demarcation box (the spot where the telephone company's lines attach to the house) was directly across from his bedroom. He can drop the length of telephone cord out of his window and then sneak to the side of the house and tap into the neighbor's line. He returns to his room for the call, and then sneaks back out to disconnect the tap. I use a similar scenario in a story taking place in 1990, but my character taps into closed businesses.

 

[Candy_Kane54]

Keep in mind that the phrase "Dropping a dime" on someone was from using a dime (10 cents) to make a call on a payphone. In fact laws were made that payphone rates couldn't be more than a dime to initiate a call.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

Keep in mind that the phrase "Dropping a dime" on someone was from using a dime (10 cents) to make a call on a payphone. In fact laws were made that payphone rates couldn't be more than a dime to initiate a call.

Were Boy/Girl Scouts and Brownies told to always carry a dime in case of emergency?

It was still a 2p copper coin when I was a Brownie - you had to polish them on Founders Day, but then went up to 10p.

 

[alohadave]

Would the classic trick of phoning, letting the phone ring 3 times, and hanging up, as a code to let the recipient know to call or or all was ok, work?

In the UK, calling collect (a 'reverse charge call') cost about 3x the normal call rate, though the recipient could hear both you and the operator, so it was possible to gabble 'Dad, pick me up at 9 at Salford station' while the operator was saying "I have a reverse-charge call from Name. Do you accept the charges?" And then there'd be a "I most certainly do not! (yeah Salford at 9)" before the phone was slammed down.

Phone boxes (booths, in America?) were
everywhere. As long as the caller had an excuse to be out that house, that would likely be the obvious solution.

This is a classic commercial from the 90s along those lines:

 

[gunhilltrain]

I never expected to get so many responses, and I'm trying to read them all. The way I remember it, the collect call would be charged to the recipient, not the caller, even if it was from a pay phone. At one point (the 1970s?), an operator would come on and ask you what name she should use when talking to the recipient. Then the phone being called would start ringing. When the recipient picked up the phone and said "hello", the operator would break in again and and ask something like, "There is a collect call here from so and so. Do you accept the charges?" Am I remembering that correctly?

I think I only made a few collect calls when I was in high school and college when I needed to call someone from a pay phone. I believe one had to have a dime to initiate the process but I don't remember if it was returned. Many phone booths had instructions in them on how to make a collect call, which required some kind of prefix - I think - before the actual phone number.

 

[gunhilltrain]

And then there's the Jim Croce song, which sort of captured the payphone experience.

Yes, there was "directory assistance" where you could ask someone at the phone company to look up a number for you. I think one had to dial 411. That would only work if the number was publicly listed by the recipient. Actually, all of the numbers were available to the operator, but he or she would tell you that the number was "unlisted" and thus you were out of luck with that one.

I once dialed 911 by accident, and the dispatcher at the other end was kind of pissed-off that I had made a mistake.

 

[gunhilltrain]

Same trick worked and was often employed in the US. I guess it would still work, if you can find one of the tiny number of remaining pay phones.

All operator-assisted calls in the US were higher charges, even normal long-distance calls. The phrase “direct dial” I recall appearing at some point when I was very young. If you direct-dialed a long-distance call it was cheaper than going through the operator, whether it was collect/reverse or not.

Where I grew up, the only fully enclosed phone booths I ever saw were on television. The public pay phones were usually on the sides or inner walls of buildings and covered by a hooded enclosure that somewhat protected the phone. It had two sides that extended about two feet below the phone, but rarely reached the ground. It seemed designed to offer some protection to the phone but not much to the user and definitely offered no privacy if anyone were near.

Both kinds of pay phones - covered and uncovered - where available in New York. If it was a booth, they were usually painted green. Eventually too many people - including the homeless I guess - were using them to take a leak, and exterior only phones replaced all of the booths.

Grand Central Terminal had an entire room of phone booths which were nice because they had seats.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

In the UK it was free to dial 100 for the operator - I don't think it cost even before my memory, which roughly coincides with direct-dialling for long-distance.

It still is free - I called once a few years ago from a station payphone as I'd left my phone at home. I was embarrassed about having to make a reverse-charge call, and the op said if I had a credit card, she could take the details and then if the details matched, the call would simply be charged to my own phone bill.

Phone Booth (2002 movie) is worth watching and clearly some phone booths with doors have survived.

The UK iconic red ones did often reek of piss, but the newer ones with large paned doors and a bigger gap at the floor didn't smell any better, just made your ankles cold when phoning your lover for an hour...

 

[Kumquatqueen]

Public buildings would have payphones with the curved hoods over, which allegedly cut out background noise.

As teenagers in England we were very envious of Americans with free local calls, not even needing to wait until 1 or 6pm! I tended to avoid my dad when the phone bill came in... Even when finding out that the local areas were very small (my cousin could chat to a couple school friends but not her bestie who lived on the other side of the small town), there was still envy.

I lived about 20 miles from London, just inside where all of London was a local call (my parents picked the location on purpose!), but even so, calling a friend before 6pm was unthinkable. Even when I worked in an office in 1990, calls were meant to be after 1pm only, unless definitely urgent!

 

[Voboy]

Would the classic trick of phoning, letting the phone ring 3 times, and hanging up, as a code to let the recipient know to call or or all was ok, work?

In the UK, calling collect (a 'reverse charge call') cost about 3x the normal call rate, though the recipient could hear both you and the operator, so it was possible to gabble 'Dad, pick me up at 9 at Salford station' while the operator was saying "I have a reverse-charge call from Name. Do you accept the charges?" And then there'd be a "I most certainly do not! (yeah Salford at 9)" before the phone was slammed down.

Phone boxes (booths, in America?) were everywhere. As long as the caller had an excuse to be out that house, that would likely be the obvious solution.

This was how I would tell my mom it was time to come pick me up from track practice in the early nineties. Payphone, collect call, hangup. Then she would appear.

When I was a kid, my grandma was on what I now know must have been a [low] fixed income. So when she wanted to talk to us, she would "dingle" as we called it (one ring), which would let us know that Grammy wanted us to call her. That way, the charges would be borne by my mom and dad.

She only lived about an hour away, but it was a long-distance call.