Johnny Rabbit's Telephone Exchange Nostalgia

Total Information AM Weekend

Join Johnny Rabbit as he takes us on a nostalgic journey through the history of telephone exchanges in St. Louis, from the 1920s to the early 1960s. Johnny discusses how phone numbers once began with area-specific prefixes or exchanges, such as LA for Laclede and PR for Prospect, allowing people to pinpoint neighborhoods or towns just by the prefix. Learn about the evolution of dialing, the introduction of Touch-Tone phones, and the colorful range of telephones from the past. Johnny also reminisces about the days of coin-operated public phones, the cost of long-distance calls, and the transition from unified phone books to the separate white and yellow pages.