Oak Hill, KS 1964 Directory

[Mr. Bones]

     Happened to win this on ePay, a short while back. I bought it because it is 'relatively' close to where I currently reside, but found lots of interesting information, especially regarding telephone number schemes.

     Note that one of the banks that bought advertising is telephone number "3". Wow! And to think that I thought I was from a small hicktown!

Best regards, y'all!

[Scotophor]

Speaking of small hick towns, my mother is from a small town (I believe it may actually officially be named "The Village of Pleasant Gap" but usually shortened to just "Pleasant Gap") in Pennsylvania. She attended a genuine classic cliche "one-room schoolhouse" for the early part of her education. As far as I know, the building still exists, but is no longer part of a school. I think when she grew up the village had one traffic signal, but I believe it has at least three now.

[jsowers]

My aunt has lived in the same small town in NC called Kings Mountain for about 60 years. I found a directory from 1959 that had the town listed and bought it. It's a small size directory like yours, but without the tabs for each town. It's divided into towns and by then everyone had 2L5N phone numbers except for Kings Mountain, which still evidently had manual service with numbers like 1 or 35 or 2045. By manual service, I mean all calls were handled by an operator and no phones had dials on them. Some had letters after the number, which I assume meant party lines.

It was interesting to see who or what had the lowest numbers. They were mills and banks and doctors, so likely they were the first to get telephones and it went in chronological order. All the towns had service from Southern Bell. Kings Mountain wasn't included in the yellow pages anywhere and in the white pages, when a Kings Mountain business was listed in another city's listings, it said dial "0" and ask for 473 or whatever the number was.

I'm sure they had dial service shortly after. My aunt and uncle fixed up an old two-story farmhouse and moved out in the country about 1963. They had two black 500 sets with the metal fingerwheel and a 7-digit phone number and their house was pre-wired like a Telephone Planned Home. I had the distinct honor to be the one to put wall jacks in place of all those faceplates. It was fun finding them all and making them work.