Great Grandfather's Oldsmobile marketing
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Registered User
Joined: Apr 2011
Posts: 2,703
Great Grandfather's Oldsmobile marketing
In light of TK-65's post about the dealership his car came from, I figured I show you guys something my dad sent me a few months ago. Sort of cool...
"I was looking thru my Aunt Mary Naomi Alexander's stuff (she saved everything) and ran across ANOTHER Olds post card sent to your GGrandfather Hardin in 1966 (see attached). I sent you one I found a few weeks back of a 1956 Olds card sent to him (attached also). Looks like the car dealer targeted him once every 10 years. He never bought an Olds but often talked about wanting a Buick. Back then, only rich folks had Buick's and Oldsmobiles. Hardin Alexander worked for Ford Motor Company back in the late 1920's /early 1930's in Dallas, but he always owned Chevrolet's. Maybe he knew how the Fords were put together back then (HaHa). Love you, Dad"
"I was looking thru my Aunt Mary Naomi Alexander's stuff (she saved everything) and ran across ANOTHER Olds post card sent to your GGrandfather Hardin in 1966 (see attached). I sent you one I found a few weeks back of a 1956 Olds card sent to him (attached also). Looks like the car dealer targeted him once every 10 years. He never bought an Olds but often talked about wanting a Buick. Back then, only rich folks had Buick's and Oldsmobiles. Hardin Alexander worked for Ford Motor Company back in the late 1920's /early 1930's in Dallas, but he always owned Chevrolet's. Maybe he knew how the Fords were put together back then (HaHa). Love you, Dad"
Oldsdruid
Joined: Dec 2007
Posts: 10,627
From: Southside Vajenya
From a time gone by when you could simply address mail "City" and it would get to who it was supposed to. Try that now...
Mid-80s I sent my Aunt Tillie a birthday card in Jacksonville FL and addressed it "Jax FL". It came back undeliverable.
The TU is simply the exchange code for that city or area of it. Here it was SWiftX-XXXX, neighboring towns were KRamer and LYman. The Bells finally decided it was simpler to just use numbers.
I can remember a time on the LYman exchange when you didn't even have to dial LY7-XXXX. You just dialed the four digit number and it connected.
Salesmen's demonstrator cars are a thing of the past too, I think.
Mid-80s I sent my Aunt Tillie a birthday card in Jacksonville FL and addressed it "Jax FL". It came back undeliverable.
The TU is simply the exchange code for that city or area of it. Here it was SWiftX-XXXX, neighboring towns were KRamer and LYman. The Bells finally decided it was simpler to just use numbers.
I can remember a time on the LYman exchange when you didn't even have to dial LY7-XXXX. You just dialed the four digit number and it connected.
Salesmen's demonstrator cars are a thing of the past too, I think.
Registered User
Joined: Jun 2009
Posts: 15,191
From: southeastern Michigan
Check this out:
Telephone EXchange Name Project
http://ourwebhome.com/TENP/TENproject.html
And this one. TUlip is down there under "88", of all things!
http://ourwebhome.com/TENP/Recommended.html
Telephone EXchange Name Project
http://ourwebhome.com/TENP/TENproject.html
And this one. TUlip is down there under "88", of all things!
http://ourwebhome.com/TENP/Recommended.html
Connoisseur d'Junque
Joined: Sep 2010
Posts: 21,183
From: The Hudson Valley
Remember that the Bell System was only one of a number of competing telephone systems a hundred years ago. Many areas, especially rural areas, had systems run by smaller companies, or by "Mom and Pop" companies, with equipment supplied by Stromberg, Automatic Electric, etc. (the last one closed down just a few years ago in northern Maine - the switchboard was in the family's livingroom, and they would take turns answering and connecting people).
One of the selling points of some of the early (1890's) companies was "direct dial," where everybody had a number, and you picked up the phone and dialed it yourself.
Bell had not fully developed this system, and used that as a selling point - they offered more "personal" service: you picked up the phone and asked a real person to connect you to the party you wanted. Part of this was the minimizing of the number of numbers a person would have to remember.
In a small town, you could pick up the phone and ask for "Bill Johnson," or "Jim's Grocery," and they's put you through (one of the things that upset people when that system in Maine finally closed was that they could no longer just pick up the phone and ask for "Emma," and have the operator ring whatever number she figured Emma would be near at this time of day).
In larger cities, you needed a number, but for a long time you never needed more than four, and later five digits (where my grandparents lived in New York City, they didn't have phone dials installed until 1946). You'd pick up the phone and ask for the exchange and the number, such as "PEnnsylvania 6-5000." Initially, each exchange was unique, and represented a specific switch, but after a while, they'd get up near 10,000 numbers and have to stick a number on the end of the exchange. Some of the common exchanges in my area when I was a kid were ELgin, SAvoy, and YUkon. They would often refer to the geographic area where they were located, such as PEnnsylvania (the area near Penn Station), MUrray Hill (Murray Hill), and ATlantic (the exchange of my number in the coastal town where I live now). The exchange of a phone number conveyed information about the neighborhood or the town where the number was located.
After the introduction of direct-dial nationwide in the thirties through the fifties, the named exchanges were assigned numbers, and continued to serve as a convenient mnemonic device for millions of callers. Since the sixties, though, with direct-dial long-distance, the phone company has been emphasizing numbers-only, and when they freed up strings with a zero or a one in the middle for use as local exchanges in the eighties, that pretty much killed it.
A mainframe? in 1900? Ha! Good one!
- Eric
One of the selling points of some of the early (1890's) companies was "direct dial," where everybody had a number, and you picked up the phone and dialed it yourself.
Bell had not fully developed this system, and used that as a selling point - they offered more "personal" service: you picked up the phone and asked a real person to connect you to the party you wanted. Part of this was the minimizing of the number of numbers a person would have to remember.
In a small town, you could pick up the phone and ask for "Bill Johnson," or "Jim's Grocery," and they's put you through (one of the things that upset people when that system in Maine finally closed was that they could no longer just pick up the phone and ask for "Emma," and have the operator ring whatever number she figured Emma would be near at this time of day).
In larger cities, you needed a number, but for a long time you never needed more than four, and later five digits (where my grandparents lived in New York City, they didn't have phone dials installed until 1946). You'd pick up the phone and ask for the exchange and the number, such as "PEnnsylvania 6-5000." Initially, each exchange was unique, and represented a specific switch, but after a while, they'd get up near 10,000 numbers and have to stick a number on the end of the exchange. Some of the common exchanges in my area when I was a kid were ELgin, SAvoy, and YUkon. They would often refer to the geographic area where they were located, such as PEnnsylvania (the area near Penn Station), MUrray Hill (Murray Hill), and ATlantic (the exchange of my number in the coastal town where I live now). The exchange of a phone number conveyed information about the neighborhood or the town where the number was located.
After the introduction of direct-dial nationwide in the thirties through the fifties, the named exchanges were assigned numbers, and continued to serve as a convenient mnemonic device for millions of callers. Since the sixties, though, with direct-dial long-distance, the phone company has been emphasizing numbers-only, and when they freed up strings with a zero or a one in the middle for use as local exchanges in the eighties, that pretty much killed it.
- Eric
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