"Citrus" in a phone number

[Donald Markstein]

> What does "Citrus" mean (as part of a phone number)?

Words were commonly used in phone numbers in the U.S., until well into the
1960s. They referred to the names of neighborhood telephone exchanges, which
local calls would be routed through. Usually (but not always) they referred
to something about the neighborhood, so I guess Daisy's neighborhood had a
lot of citrus trees or the streets were paved with tangelos or something
like that. They were translated into numbers by associating the numbers 2-9
on the phone dial with three letters each (two were dropped from the
alphabet, X and I forget which other), and dialing the first two as part of
the number. "Citrus", or "CI", would have translated as "24". The
word/number combination was usually rendered in print with both of the first
letters capitalized -- thus, Daisy's number would have been written as
"CItrus 2437".

Until the 1950s, a U.S. phone number consisted of a word followed by four
digits. When we reached a point where six digits weren't enough to give a
unique number to each phone in a local dialing area, a digit was added after
the exchange, with a hyphen separating it from the main number -- thus,
Daisy's number might have become "CItrus 5-2437". Later, as old-style
telephone exchanges went out of use, the word was replaced by the numbers,
so Daisy would have given her number as "245-2437". Even today, U.S. 7-digit
phone numbers are usually given with hyphens between the third and fourth,
tho it's been decades since the first part referred to a specific
neighborhood.

Which reminds me of an old joke. Guy calls Information (they call it
Directory Assistance now) for a number, and the one they give him is
"CApital 5-9020", and he says "How do you make a capital 5?" Of course, this
joke no longer works, because by the time he opened his mouth, the operator,
if any, would be long gone.

(No, this is not off-topic. It's as a Barks annotation.) (Okay, the joke
is.)

Quack, Don

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