I had coffee there this morning, started searching on Sherbrooke before I said to myself, lets see if there is an answer already before I waste anymore time.
Would love to see more old pictures of this part of town, especially some of those old buildings between Queen Mary and Cote St. Luc. Very curious to learn what the east side of Decarie looked like before the trench was dug.
Oh wow!!! As soon as I saw this photo without looking at any of the shop signs or reading the comments, I thought "Queen Mary and Decarie"! I worked at Viva (the clothing shop on Queen Mary) for several years in the 90's, and you can see the building where Viva is now, in the photo.
LOL, there's Larry's shoe store too!! I remember when that closed down about the mid 1990's. I bought some shoes there at their closing sale.
Up until 1964 when the Decarie Expressway excavation began, Decarie Blvd. itself from Cote St. Luc to Queen Mary Rd. was narrower that from Queen Mary northward. The east side avenues such as Dalou and Saranac were longer than they are currently because some of the end duplexes were demolished in order to widen Decarie to match its width from Queen Mary northward.
On Queen Mary Rd. itself there was relatively new Royal Bank at the southeast corner of Decarie, but it too was demolished and in 1965 reopened in a brand new building on Queen Mary between Mountain Sights and Westbury Avenues.
Vintage photos show the tram lines (and later bus lines now on a paved road which replaced the tram tracks) which ran in an exclusive right-of-way down the centre of Decarie north of Queen Mary Rd. Garland Terminus opened in 1949 at 6340 Decarie (its tramline's electrical power house at 6310. This terminus was built to alleviate the horrendous steadily-increasing traffic jams at Queen Mary and Decarie between trams, cars, and trucks. When the tram era ended in 1959, busses replaced them from Garland and it later closed around 1964-65, I believe. The terminus was replaced by an apartment building--Le Castel Blanc--at 6280 Decarie. How many of the residents there even know that a tram and bus station existed where they live today?
Up until the summer of 1959, the twin tram lines then swerved over to the west side of Decarie around Vezina to the west of the underpass beneath the CPR railway tracks, the trams using a unique trestle-overpass to cross them; tram route 17 (and later bus) running through Ville St. Laurent and terminating in Cartierville near where the current bus route 64 ends just south of Gouin Blvd. near the former Belmont Park playground which itself later closed down the due to competition from La Ronde.
But, back to the east side of Decarie between Lacombe and Cote St. Catherine Rd.: many apartment buildings (including the car dealership Decarie Motors) which had been built in the 1940s and 50s were unnecessarily demolished, I suspect because there may have been a preliminary plan to run the still non-existent Metro line underneath Decarie, and the city wanted to gobble up the properties before the owners got wind of any such plan. Only a suspicion, however.
In any event, from 1980 the Metro Orange Line eventually opened, running several blocks to the east of Decarie mostly beneath Victoria Avenue instead, the stations opening one by one from Snowdon to de Namur at which point it then did in fact run alongside Decarie Blvd. and eventually all the way to Cote Vertu. I can only assume that someone in City Hall or the Metro Planning Dept. made the decision for the Orange Line to serve the more highly-populated residential area to the east of Decarie than those mostly duplexes to the west.
Subsequently, the empty lots of those demolished apartment buildings between Lacombe and Cote St. Catherine were built upon with the currently-existing gas stations (too many, really!) and some newer apartment blocks with commercial establishment on their ground floors.
Today, several vintage photos of the area can be seen in the window of the photo shop on the northeast corner of Decarie and Queen Mary Rd. That Nu-Way tobacco shop/newsstand on the corner was there for decades, and it was a shock to local patrons when it closed. I was myself a regular to that newsstand for decades as well. To its west, in the 50s and 60s, there used to be Peggy's Nut Shop from beneath whose window was (and I believe, still is!) a grill-vent from which the strong smell of roasted nuts used to waft! Further west was Queen Mary Hardware (later a Rona), a small branch of Morgan's (later renamed The Bay), and the Woolworth's--now a Jean Coutu.
The TD Bank on the Northeast corner of Queen Mary and Decarie closed a few years ago and became a Quebec Liquor outlet. Directly north of that was Miss Snowdon restaurant, upon whose roof for many years was a huge Humpty Dumpty Potato Chip billboard-type sign; the arms and legs moving back and forth, the eyes winking. Then, there was a Dack's Shoe shop, and further up the famous Snowdon Tavern which burned down on a New Year's Eve back in the 1980s.
No mistaking Decarie & Queen Mary, although the "British Consols" (rather than Nu-Way Tobacco) kinda threw me a bit. We used to get the Star at Joe Black's newsstand in Nu-Way. Every day except Sunday. That was reserved for the New York Journal-American, Sunday News, and Sunday Mirror, also from "Black's"... I used to kinda dread going for the paper because every once in a while Mr.Black would send me (almost) next door to Cape's drugstore, where another Joe, the fellow who had the lunch counter there would mutter "Son-of-a-bitch!" whenever I asked for "Mr.Black's special drink" which was just seltzer. There was never any charge for it: Mr.Black always warned me not to let lunch counter Joe try to charge. Not that Joe B. couldn't afford his seltzer water: Story in the neighbourhood was that he was a pretty successful bookie, owning "all those" apartment buildings running up Decarie from Snowdon to Cote St.Luc. Anyways, Mr.Black had plenty of us kids delivering papers to godforsaken areas like Hampstead in return for comic books and whatever tips we got. I found a bit later (from another "delivery boy") that I should riffle through the paper, and checking out what was in the envelope tucked inside. My informant claimed we were delivering bet payments, and a quick peek combined with a mention of how much was in there could boost a quarter tip to a few dollars. Never had the guts to do that, but sometimes the tips were surprisingly good for delivering a ten-cent paper from just a few blocks away. A couple of doors North, on Decarie, were two stores that shared an entrance-way: "Natalie", a hat shop owned by a Mrs.Houle, and a jewelry store owned by her husband. I bought a Heuer watch from Mr.Houle for something like $125 around 1967/68. It was only a few bucks cheaper than a Rolex, but I preferred it because the Rolexes were just so gaudy. I got a kick out of that watch one day when I was with my mom in Margolese's jewelry shop on Queen Mary at Earnscliffe, in that little two-story building that's still there, surrounded by the high-rise built up in the late sixties. I neede a new watchband. Mrs.Margolese ( pretty nasty old biddy) looked at my watch and commented that I had some nerve bringing a piece of junk like that into her establishment. Soft-spoken Mr.Margolese just glanced at my watch and said to his wife "Woman, this is an excellent quality timepiece. I suggest you remain silent, and stop making a fool out of yourself, until you learn to recognize such things." I never minded getting dragged in there to pick up rings, brooches, and whatnot after that. Parting note: There's a Metro grocery store on Queen Mary between Trans Island and Mountain Sights (just East of Decarie). The Eastern half of that store used to be a Steinberg's. The Western half was a Zeller's. Zeller's was a pretty boring store, except they had a real, live monkey in the basement pet department. Upstairs from the store was the head office of the entire Zeller's chain. I think they only moved out of there (to the old Bell Telephone building on Decarie and Isabella) when they hit around 100 stores. Next time, maybe I'll tell you about Leo Belanger, and why just about every kid I knew hated him, despite him being a really nice guy...
I also remember Peggy's nut store and the aroma. Quite a warm inviting smell when you were actually freezing your own nuts off outside in the cold weather. Wasn't there a Maury Heft's clothing store in the same block in the 1960s?
@URBAN LEGEND - Thanks for the memories. Used to love going to Black & Orange , with my Gramps , to get a new book , then over to Cape's Drugs for lunch at the counter.
re: Archies Successor Thanks for your memories of Joe Black and Nu-Wat Tobacco Shop. I remember him well. Always very gruff. I heard that he died while watching a hockey game on TV at his girlfriend's place. I'm guessing that the Archie in your name refers to Archie Wilensky, who ran Snowdon Pocket Novels on Dalou, Decarie near Musset (now Snowdon), and Decarie near Isabella for years?
re: Colin Patterson Morrie Heft closed about 7 or 8 years ago. It was on the south side of Queen Mary, between Decarie and Circle Road. Towards the end, it was owned by a former salesman and his son. I still have some of their sport jackets in my closet.
re: ndgguy When I was much younger, I would head to Black and Orange for my school supplies. I remember the owner, a tall guy with slicked black hair who never smiled, who scared me more than Joe Black across the street. They ran a lending library from the store where one could "rent" books for 5 cents a day.
I used to regularly visit Archie's Pocket Novels & Comics on the east side of Decarie near Lacombe to browse, buy and sell comics, magazines, and soft cover books, often finding some pretty rare stuff, too. I remember going in the day his wife (or was it his daughter?) said that Archie had passed away. Someone else later ran the place, I believe, but not for very long.
Nello's Pizza on Decarie and then his brother's Leaning Tower of Pizza were popular in the neighbourhood. There was a Dionne supermarket on the east side of Decarie just south of Queen Mary--demolished to make way for the "Depressway".
To the east of the Black & Orange book store on Queen Mary, there was also a Dalfen's which had a small record department. My aunt once took me in there when she wanted buy the latest 78 rpm hit record, "Fever" by Peggy Lee--which I later inherited and still have today! West of Black & Orange was Tops Barber Shop.
Further east on Queen Mary between Mountain Sights and Westbury Ave., a new Royal Bank branch opened with exquisite white marble floors and counters in the brand new building which replaced a single large older apartment building.
Futher east of where the Snowdon Metro is today, there was the Black and White variety store (today called depanneurs). The old couple proprieters were usually sour-faced and grumpy and, if I recall, were angry when they were presumably forced out during the Metro station excavation and construction. In any event, another depanneur replaced them which still exists today.
Richstone's Bakery, Gerry Snyder's Sport Shop, etc. were further east. The Snowdon Medical Building at 4950 Queen Mary was highly-touted when originally proposed and built, but seems to have been a monumental flop over the successive years. Various other businesses moved into it, including Sun Life Insurance and a Commerce Bank for awhile. A dreary, dismal place today!
About horse-drawn vehicles: the last one I ever saw on Trans Island was early in 1956--a trash wagon! Up until then, I would on rare occasion see horse-drawn commercial wagons--as well as tourist's caleches, of course--elsewhere in the city. Guaranteed Pure Milk dairy had them for years, as I'm sure did other dairies, bakeries, etc.
Apparently one of the very last horse-drawn commercial vehicles was used by a grocer downtown somewhere around Lincoln and what is today de Maisonneuve. The horse was named Dobbin.
I also remember the ice man up until about 1955, who with his metal tongs would haul huge chunks of ice to a little old lady on Maplewood who must have been one of the very few owning an icebox and who didn't yet own a refrigerator by that date.
MP&I will surely know more about horses in the city than I.
By the way, tram fare for children was 5 cents up until around 1959. Phone booth calls in that era were 10 cents, a quart of milk 25 cents, bottle of coke 10 cents, etc. Life was less complicated back then and less expensive!
Mr. Lew and his wife were the owners of Black and White Stationary store. Their daughters and their daughters' husbands also worked in the store, so it was a real family business. You can see Mr. Lew talking about how he first opened the store in the first two minutes of this National Film Board film: "Our Street Was Paved With Gold"
Also: "City Unique", by William Weintraub. Publisher: Robin Brass Studio Inc.
Website:
http://www.robinbrassstudio.com/
For great vintage photos both black and white and in colour, along with historical descriptions, see the "Collection Pignon sur rue" series of booklets published by the City of Montreal back in the 1980s, and now surely available at our largest libraries.
Urban Legend said: "I can only assume that someone in City Hall or the Metro Planning Dept. made the decision for the Orange Line to serve the more highly-populated residential area to the east of Decarie than those mostly duplexes to the west"
In deed there was a big fight at City Hall and in the neighbourhood. Ultimately the planners changed the route to run up Victoria in that stretch rather than Décarie.
Hi Harold! I believe we had some correspondance a few years back about Snowdon, starting with Archie, and evenually rambling off into my apparently endless blathering about restaurants I've known and loved. Hope everything's ticking along OK for you nowadays.
Now I'll tell everyone why all the kids I knew around Coolbrook/Queen Mary hated Leo Belanger:
Leo and his family lived in a stand-alone cottage on Coolbrook just across the driveway from the Bank of Montreal on Queen Mary. They were quite well-to do. At one time they were said to own something like 45 or 50 taxis.
Anyways, we hated Leo because we all used to play cowboys & Indians (Natives & Imperialists?) all over the neighbourhood, especially in the huge area behind the old apartments that ran along Decarie from the back of the Queen Mary buildings to where Wendy's is now. It was a great playground: a bit of a hill in the middle, plenty or rubble, bramble bushes and even a couple of sheds. Perfect terrain for a bunch of rambunctious little commandoes. The only thing that could make it better would be ditching those lame cap guns with that ugly string of red paper coming out the top in favour of ...BB guns! But we weren't allowed to have BB guns, not even if we promised not to shoot an eye out like Leo did. Several people I've known were quite friendly with Leo, everyone saying he's a pretty nice guy. I only met him once or twice myself. I don't even know if he really did shoot out an eye, but that's the story all our parents gave as the reason we couldn't have BB guns. It was all Leo's fault. And so we hated him.
Anyways, Urban Legend, you mentioned Archie's store on Decarie at Lacombe. Archie died in that store, around 1971. His sister, Sylvia, inherited and operated it until about 1986 when I bought it from her. I had it for a few years, until the landlord decided to double the rent. It was pretty marginal anyways, Sylvia said it was only profitable because she had a few big customers for soft porn novels. Good enough, but not good enough to cover twice the rent. I really only bought it out of sentiment anyways: I'd helped Archie build the shelves there in the mid-sixties, and when Sylvia put it up for sale 20 years later, I just couldn't let the old place die, even though I always disliked it- uncomfortable place, 40' deep and 8' wide. I much preferred/loved his first store on Dalou, and even the one on Decarie near Dionne's was better. Anyways, enough of this: I feel a dose of endless keyboard hammering coming on, and I better cut it out before it goes nuclear.
I'll leave you guys with a link to a little site from an NDG real-estate broker. Not the greatest, but it's full of little bits, pieces, and photos of NDG's history: http://www.n-d-g.ca/english/?page_id=19
Service was once the motto of The Bell Telephone Company of Canada and this word once was found in the centre of the Bell in their circular logo.
Anyway, when we moved from Snowdon to NDG, there were 'No Plant Facilities', as the Bell would put it, and we had to wait a few weeks for a telephone, and then had to share a Party Line for a short time thereafter.
Not the Bell's fault.
Too many people, too many moves in the boom of the Fifties, after the War.
Schools took a while to catch up, also.
Our Snowdon number was ELwood.
The new number in NDG was DExter, Becoming HUnter 4, then 484 after 7-digit dialing came in.
There was a WAlnut in addition.
The Exchange on Monkland between Hingston and Hampton across from the 'Y' occupied only the Eastern part of the block thru 1950-51, then was expanded West to front the whole block on Monkland.
Worked there for a time, routining Line Finders, Selectors and Connectors as Step-by-Step was disappearing,
The Dial Tone, and others, created within rotating metal discs partly-filled with mercury.
Hunter 2 was already Cross Bar with Touch Tone available.
The first push button telephones had only 10 buttons.
Step-by-Step switching soon to follow steam locomotives and the streetcars that used to run along Monkland into history.
Just before all-number dialing was complete, the last two NEW Named numbers in the area were TRiangle and OXford.
A S by S Exchange running full-out was NOISY and took 3000 Amps @ 48 V.
The alarm gong with metal bars and an electric solenoid hammer similar to those found in a Xylophone, ringing out the troubles to be cleared by the CO men.
I miss the old Bell crest, and the green trucks with the red wheels.
From paper-wrapped pairs within a pressurized lead sheath to PIC cable and BL-OR-GN-BR-SL WH-RD-BK-YL-VT.
' No job is so important and no service is so urgent...etc.'
Hopefully, someday a Steve Jobs-type successor will find way to plug our brains into the computer so that we can finally dispense with all of this keyboard activity (voice-control apparently still not yet perfected a la Star Trek!), but, to the subject at hand:
It is unacceptible that too many landlords can legally jack up the rents of commercial establishments seemingly to whatever they wish with no Rental Board limitations, as is the case with residential tenants who do have some recourse.
In particular, Monkland Avenue has in recent years been ravaged by such greed, driving out popular establishments and, I believe, even the Provigo left for that reason--replaced by an overpriced restaurant!
No more major supermarket for that densely-populated district!
On a busy calling period, say a Thursday evening, an old SxS switch sounded like hail pelting on a tin roof. Contrast that to a quiet early Sunday morning when you could hear an individual call set up.
In 1966-67 Northern Electric launched the first semi-computerized switched. 1979 saw the launch of Northern's DMS fully solid-state switch.
Interesting (to those having technical interest in such matters) about telephone evolution.
How many remember when anyone could call anyone waiting at a pay phone?
Unfortunately, by the mid to late 80s, due to criminal activity-- including drug dealers consistently hanging around pay phones, etc., (in the days before they used pagers and then cellphones)--most phone companies around the world blocked such incoming calls.
My only unanswered question regarding this is: does the Operator today still have that capability? Can she call me back if I hang up or become disconnected at a pay phone?
Operators are evasive whenever I've asked that question.
Has anyone ever received a call back from the Operator to the pay phone they were using?
Yes I recall walking by a payphone and heard it ringing. The last ones to do this were Northern's Centurion phones: http://www.phworld.org/payphone/nortel.htm
The number of human operators is down to just a handfull, but they have software on their workstation that can control the phone remotely, in case you lose your money or something.
Interesting about the Operator being able to access pay phones. I always assumed that they could do so, but they just never admitted it.
I suppose the next gimmick is to remove the actual phone number from every pay phone and leave some sort of serial number visible which only the telco technician can understand as the phone's identifier.
There has been a suggestion that pay phones be reduced and even removed from public access entirely due to the obvious prevalence of cellphones, but I say NO because not everyone wants to bring their cellphone with them on vacation or rent one while away from home, but still may need to make a call.
In New Zealand I once found someone's lost cellphone on a bench and took it to a tourist information kiosk to be returned.
I worked at Bell Canada for many years, ending somewhere around 1993 and I never heard of a trick an operator could use in order to make a pay phone ring.
I am assuming that you know the reason that the phone company disabled their ability to receive calls?
Yes, Kristian, I stated the reason further up this page, but in a nutshell: abuse by criminals, who would hang around pay phones to do their drug deals, etc.
Decades I'd seen a few documentaries about how scammers in the U.S.A virtually made their living at payphones, so I imagine the telcos finally wanted to stop the "bad press" and shut them down.
This is, however, a subject in which you can delve very deeply.
Um, no the reason the phone companies disabled the ability to receive phone calls at phone booths is because people were accepting collect calls on them. We had a very elaborate checking system for every single call that came in. The fourth digit was almost always a 9 or a 0. Nonetheless we had to "check for coin" at "rates and routes" for every single request and that other operator's job all day long was simply to look up those numbers in a big book to see if they were pay phones.
Must have been a lot of collect calls for the telcos to finally realize after around the 60 or 70 years of the existence of pay phones that they were being scammed out of money.
Surely they must have had the technology to block such incoming collect calls from connecting to pay phones which are clearly identifiable by their number?
It IS possible that this was the final "straw that broke the camel's back", but I still believe that criminal activity was of more concern once the law enforcement authorities put pressure on them.
I would like to read the testimony of telco engineers to know what they knew.
When working for the Bell in the Sixties, the coin collector ( pay telephone ) we were installing was a rotary-dial black unit called a 233HS with a coin chute at the top in sized holes for 5-10-25 cent denominations. The coins passed thru gates and chutes and went 'Ding' for a nickle, Ding-Ding for a dime and Bong for a quarter, striking a bell either once for a nickel, twice for a dime or a coiled spring-like chime for a quarter. The Operator could hear the tones and count them up to the total cash requested on a toll call. On a local call, the tones were still produced, but had no bearing on a local call. A local 10 cent call could be made with a quarter if thats all you had, but, change not given back. If the call went thru, after you hung up, a signal was sent over the wire pair from the Central Office to the telephone to 'accept' the coins into the removable coin receptacle in the bottom part of the phone, the relay operated and shunted and dropped the coins into the receptacle. If the call did not go thru, the opposite signal was sent from the CO and the relay shunted and dropped the coin held back to the caller thru the coin return chute. The Operator back then could accept or return coins with keys at her console. She could also 'ring' the payphone if necessary. Other telephone callers from payphones or NON-payphones could dial a payphone and it would ring. On 'classic' pay telephones, the RINGER ( Bells ) and the Network for the audio part of the telephone were in a SEPARATE unit called a 'Subset'. After Expo67, the Bell decided to eliminate the 'calling in' ability on certain pay telephones as they were being used for questionable motives. One day I was sent out from 5757 with about 15 service orders, a box of placard holders, metal, and placards, glossy, black lettering on yellow in both official languages which said something like 'This pay telephone will no longer accept incoming calls.' Most pay phones on the list were alone, but, one location, in the washrooms below ground at Place D'Armes had a bank of them with all sorts of sleazos orbiting around shifting from foot-to-foot, chain smoking and looking daggers as I mounted the placard holder and inserted the placard. As I backed away, they hoarded in like hyenas to see what it said. Then the noise began and they surrounded me, demanding in mists of spittle Why/Porquoi? I shrugged and showed them the orange service orders and sidled to the stairs, Don't know/c'est pas! The ringer signal came from the exchange and the bells, then COULD still be rung by the Operator or the Test Centre, as the bells were not removed or silenced in the field. Glad that was over with. To my dismay, a few days later, I received a note from my supervisor that 'I had NOT installed the prerequisite placard holder and placards at the Place D'Armes location' and they wanted to know why = possible discipline. I went in and said that I HAD installed the placard holder and placard as per BSP and such. Well, I was sent back to rectify this problem. Same smell, same sleazos. The placard WAS gone, but, not the holder. The placards were designed to be changed monthly in some locations and it was not rocket science to slip them in and out, a small catch holding them in. Someone had removed the placard, as if that would miraculously let the ring signal come thru from the CO. So, I took the placard holder off the wall, put in the placard, and reinserted the screws into the anchors THRU the placard, holding it in, on the wall. More groaning from the herded masses, but, grins, knowing the placard would be removed as soon as I left, or so they thought. The Foreman went and checked and a day or two later asked me as to WHY I had put the screws thru the placard, as it did not look 'good' and I told him. It went away.
I worked as an Overseas Operator where many of the calls had a 3 minute $4/min minimum - ie $12 in coins had to be put into the slot if you wanted to call certain places, which was highly impractical.
I recall putting one Polish woman through to her family, with whom she hadn't spoken for many years. After her three minutes she stuck around and put the money in the slot even though she could have just walked away. You get a good impression of certain cultures in a job like that.
Supposedly if you were clever you cheat by playing a tape recording of the various coin noises into the microphone.
But as I said, I'm pretty skeptical that the phone authorities would care about dodgy people receiving phone calls, they might've worried that people receiving phone calls might have been bad for business because they didn't make money off those calls, which blocked legitimate customers.
The obsession with preventing collect calls from going to those lines was quite extreme and they went to great lengths to avoid it.
You could not make collect international phone calls to Canada from many countries, including India, Russia, etc, but also including Germany believe it or not.
The only pay phone I can recall in Montreal that was able to accept calls was in the Westmount Tavern on Greene and St. James, now a dentist office.
For the moment, however, never mind the Operator, who in any case resides on the lower rungs of the telco hierarchy. It is the test center engineer and linesman who can do way more with their network tools. Who among us at one time or another hasn't experienced a apologetic linesman accidently breaking into their conversation while performing his circuit tests? I once even somehow became linked into a conversation between two techicians who chattered away for the longest time without even knowing I was there; the dial-tone even still blaring away while they were speaking. Weird things happen.
So, depending on who you ask regarding the Operator's capability of calling a payphone: they either can, they can't, or won't ADMIT to knowing how because of company policy.
Besides, anyone reading this can perform a simple test: stand next to a payphone in a quiet spot, use your cellphone to call the Operator or Information and ask the nice lady to "please test my landline?" by calling you back, giving her the payphone's number, of course. See what happens--or doesn't. That should clinch it. Try both Bell and Telus payphones. Try it in different countries just out of curiosity. If I had a cellphone of my own I'd have done this myself years ago, obviously.
A little history: I first tried out a push-button (called "TouchTone" or DTMF) telephone at Vancouver's Pacific National Exhibition in 1965. The phone was hooked up to a screen--the Picturephone (with its black & white screen)--which had already been trotted out for the public's amusement at the 1964 World's Fair in NYC.
The first TouchTone payphone I saw was in 1966 at a Holiday Inn near Plattsburg. ("No Canadian Coins", the sign said...and they still say that today!). The first TouchTone payphones I saw in Montreal were those at Expo67.
On a rainy day, those interested can delve into Google for info about DTMF, Picturephone, etc. Enjoy! :-)
Thanks for the clarification, MP&I. Always an eye-opener to hear first-hand information!
As I mentioned elsewhere, one can delve very deep into the many dark corridors and catacombs of the telephone network, and there are countless books, blogs, forums, and websites one can immerse oneself in--yet still not know everything. Indeed, it is in the telcos own best interests to keep the public unaware of certain weaknesses in the system which could easily (and not so easily) be exploited.
Misinformation and disinformation is also rampant, with those in-the-know likely to lose their jobs should the system become compromised in any way--which, unfortunately it HAS on occasion.
How many remember when the Bell and the media announced a specific date when the 450 area code would be switched online to alleviate the burden being placed on our original 514? But, how many people noticed that the phone company deliberately jumped the gun by connecting 450 AHEAD of schedule without warning? The reason: they clearly wanted to make sure that hackers didn't try to disrupt the procedure. Sort of like the decoy Brinks truck trick.
But, with regards to my original question: CAN the Operator call a pay phone or not? Well, yes and no, depending on which phone company we are talking about.
When AT&T was finally deprived of its monopoly in the U.S., start-ups such as Sprint had to scramble to find the talent to compete with "Ma Bell"--a daunting task, to be sure, and which all too often relegated Sprint's services to less-than-satisfactory, thus many former Bell subscribers who had hastily switched to Sprint went back to "Ma" for the reliability they had come to expect over many generations.
Telcos can be sneaky as well. Beginning in 1985 when the initial cellphone players were Bell and Cantel, how many subscribers discovered too late that only ONE of them offered the *67 call-blocking feature, and unless you had asked up-front, you probably ended up wishing you had subscribed to the one that DID offer it. Surely today all cell providers offer *67?
In my years at Bell Canada I frequently had the impression that they weren't exactly attracting the best and brightest.
I think this was because the money was just too easy for them for too long. $12 for 3 minutes for a call to India where you could barely hear - that was practically half a days wages back in the early 80s, immigrants were getting gouged by the phone system to stay in touch back home.
As phone operators we were definitely overpaid by today's standards, not that I'm complaining.
Telecommunications has advanced so incredibly since then, it's a pretty cool thing and consumers have really benefited.
The Bell brass seemed incapable of doing anything right. For example CEO Jean Monty, with his insufferable gregariousness, shiny bald head and banker's suit, would organize some sorta displays for the workers about the future of the company lying in video teleconferencing. Every one of these turned into a farce. There were glitches in the video and it turned into an embarrassing fiasco. I recall cringing at two of these events at least.
Then there were middle-managers who were dumber than a stick and god knows what they did in their cubicles. The old adage about 80 % of life was being on time was definitely true there. These managers would spend the entire day tabulating how many times you were four minutes late. Once you were there you could take off to the bathroom for quite some time without anybody noticing however.
Workers -- mainly women -- would go on burnout so often that in some offices half the staff would be gone, so there were always a lot of non-unionized part-time workers getting paid while many of the full-timers were collecting bogus burnout money.
When somebody higher-up pointed out that the female workers were really abusing the burn-outs, some union person really burnt his ass and denounced him for sexism.
I only recall Bell attracting one talented person to a management position and she really energized the office, but she didn't stay around long.
That bright young woman was replaced by a less-talented, older woman who once admonished me for dragging my feet on the office carpet when I walked. "C'est pas acceptable!" she shrieked at me.
I tried not to laugh.
That manager was soon gone from the company as well.
Nowadays whenever I'm in one of these offices crowded with unionized workers, techies sitting around chatting while on the clock, I always get the sense that it's just a matter of time before it goes down the drain.
Another pay telephone adventure and resistance to working.
Back in the Sixties the Pay Telephone Group worked out of 5757 Upper Lachine road and covered the whole area from Grenville/Hawkesbury thru to at least Joliette.
Lots of driving and you had better make sure you had the right materials when leaving, as not every Bell garage had pay telephone parts.
And a full tank of gas.
I had this service order to install a pay telephone in a booth at the NW corner of Sherbrooke and Marien in Montreal East.
The booth itself placed previously by G.M. Gest Construction, their 'yard' in La Salle on Dollard. From time to time you were sent to Gest to retrieve pay telephones and their coin receptacles brought in with a booth by Gest.
( There was a small 0-4-0T steam locomotive in the yard for a while once used by Gest on big jobs. )
The LaSalle DOminic Exchange on Clement was fairly new, then, and all Cross Bar, or so I was told.
Anyway, I get to the service station on Marien, ( No!, no Municipal traffic lights sequencing away on top of THIS one, as it was just a gas station. ) and there is a booth on the corner.
Cold, Windy, blowing snow, refinery smell.
First move, put up a drop wire from the booth mast to the terminal on the cable and strand, and strip and attach the copper wires inside to binding posts in terminal as per service order ( Cable 23 Pair 71 terminals 17 or whatever.
In PIC cable you used Skotch-loks to connect terminal wires to the proper pair in the terminal by colour code and terminate the drop onto a smaller 6-terminal block below the cable count which was exposed.)
'Rang thru' to the binding posts for my Pay Phone with 1011B test set from ANOTHER pair and shorted out my pair, proving the work was done in the exchange and out to terminal in the field.
Then I had to install a 6-foot 'Ground Rod' next to the booth for a Ground, as the coin relay depended on a Ground to properly accept/return coins.
This became the crux problem with this, and so many other jobs.
Rocks in soil, and frozen, too.
Took over a hour, moving the rod to various locations, and it still stuck out at the top end.
You had a heck of a time trying to hit the top of a 6-foot rod vibrating at eye level with a hammer.
You Nicopressed the booth ground wire to the ground rod wire with a special tool.
Hydro for the booth light had their own ground and we could not use it.
You could Not run a second drop back to the cable strand for a ground. But, some did.
Installed the telephone and sub set and it worked, sorda!
Ground no good, and booth surrounded by asphalt.
Cold, wind, snow, refinery.
Called test Centre for payphone test.
Shorted pair to measure resistance out and back on loop from exchange which was 30 ohms, lets say.
SO, the limit from the exchange to ground was 5? ohms additional, which would be half of 30 = 15 on one side of the line + 5 for ground.
Measured 25 or more, the ground test rejected by test centre and NO Okay number to sign off phone as not Okay for service, as it could not be counted on that the coin relay would work properly.
Time to cheat!! as the phone DID work and took coins. You did not put coin receptacle in until last in case you had to change the telephone and get at the mounting screws.
( The Bell got really WEIRD about pay phone money, and rightly so.
We were all 'Bonded'.
There were traps to catch Installers and coin collector folk who drove around taking full coin receptacles and replacing them with empty ones.
The full coin receptacles went to a coin processing facility off Pare at Decarie. Was there a few times watching them process coins by the TON! everything recorded to see how a payphone was 'doing' financially.
Each receptacle had a small seal holding it's latch shut, and a spring-loaded door closed over the coins inside as you pulled it out from the phone itself.
If you broke a seal off it looked BAD!!!
There were paper 'Overflow Envelopes' with gummed flaps for coinage that filled up to relay, causing it to jam, or coins that had spilled out of coin chutes into bottom of phone.
You filled in Telephone Number and Seal number on envelope and sent it in with coin receptacle.
There was a steel vault in the truck which held 13? receptacles, the key at 5757. )
So, when you wanted to cheat on the ground test you took warm water and dumped it down the ground rod which increased the conductivity, for a while.
Then it became Repairs' problem!
I went to gas station and got a bucket of hot water from rest room.
Dumped it down beside ground rod and around concrete pad the booth was on.
Waited, and did ground test again with test centre.
Still no good.
More water, another test.
The test centre guy said to stop pouring water on it ( he knew all the tricks!! ) put the phone Out of Service and tell Management.
GOOD! it was getting dark, the snow was increasing and I was FROZEN!!
Then I made a MISTAKE!!!!
I put an Out-of-Service metal sign over coin slots and screwed it on thru a hole in 10 cent slot, covering coin holes.
Then I put in vault door where coin receptacle would go. Each door had it's own KEY and serial number, = thousands of them cross referenced to telephone number in field.
BUT, figuring the telephone might have to be changed, did NOT put in a coin box, the sign on top preventing the phone from being used.
I let it go, and reported 'no ground' to Foreman.
A few days later I was called into the office and the door CLOSED! A BAD sign!!
He said they had been out to the phone at Marien and no sign over coin chute.
Furthermore there was MONEY inside where the coin box would go and they thought I was 'collecting it' for myself on the sly, dropping by from time to time to pay for coffee and lunch.
I HAD kept the vault door key, in case I had to change the phone. DUMB MOVE!
I said 'NO!' and told the whole story about the ground and the water.
I also said all my work since that day was out on the Lakeshore and Rigaud and would not have had TIME to get to Montreal East.
Besides, there was NO Okay number issued from the test centre and the phone was not to be used.
He went for it, and there was no Okay number, and this too went away.
Urban Legend & Sam Boskey : About the Métro line, it swerved east because the population was denser along Victoria than Décarie. And instead of the stops at Namur & De La Savane, there was supposed to be only one stop, at Victoria and De la Savane, and then on to Du Collège. But the line was relocated along Décarie because Robert Campeau, the real-estate magnage, had said that he was going to purchase the Blue Bonnets racetrack and build a few dozen high-rise towers, so the city figured it would be a good move to move the Métro line westward instead, so they built the Namur and De La Savane stations instead. And the high-rise project did not materialize until 40-45 years later (if it ever does)… Then it was discovered that it was just a bullshit ploy to have the Métro station built close to the racetrack; IIRC, some people went to jail for that (but definitely not Robert Campeau). Who else remembers the shuttle buses ran from the Jean-Talon Métro to the racetrack???
I calculate inflation in chocolate bars… When I was a kid, a chocolate bar was 10¢, and a big one was 20¢. They also had smaller ones at 5¢, but those disappeared in the early 70’s. So, whenever I see the price of something trivial, I say “hmmm, it’s x chocolate bars”…
Since we had a car, bus and Métro trips were few and far between, and an incredible treat, so whenever I hit on a dime, I was faced with a big dilemna: a bus ride or a chocolate bar???
So, today, a bus ride is about 3 chocolate bars.
Colin Paterson: The nut store always had stuck me as a ridiculously narrow establishment, akin to this one…
Montreal, Park & Island & Urban Legend: Regarding Bell Telephone, the HUnter exchange was the first in Canada to get DTMF (“Touch-Tone®”) dialing, around 1966 (the second served Expo’67), so we were the first to have button phones (back then, they didn’t have the * and # keys). This had a good side-effect: whenever we were sick, my mother would call the doctor and he’d be here within minutes, have a perfunctory look at us, then embark on the phone to make several phone calls, because he was served by the WEllington exchange that did not offer DTMF back then… We also have had a chime installed on the wall, so whenever someone called, the phone went “ding.....dong” instead of “drrrrrring”. But our doorbell went “drrrrrrring”, which confused me whenever we went to someone else’s because their phone rang like a doorbell and vice-versa…
When did “41091” stopped working to make your phone ring? I remember hearing about kids who jumped over a swimming pool fence in the winter, dialing “41091” on the phone, and having had the phone ring continuously through the rest of winter…
On my first serious job, I was working a on computer in a room which was right next to the PBX room, along with a phone phreak (since I was a train freak, he listened to my stories and I listened to his stories) who was always in the PBX room whenever the same tech showed up (we nicknamed him “papa Bell” because he did not hide behind company policy to chat about phone technology), and he came up often to change extensions and all that. I didn’t really care about the phone stuff, but it was nevertheless interesting. Years later, I was surprised to see him model railroading at the Canada Central…
Kristian Gravenor: You think phone company executives are stupid? Try cable companies!!!
The apartment building on your google map (right here) next to the bus laneway....I rented an apartment there for several months in 1965. 2nd floor in front closest to the bus laneway. The apartments were all 1 room bachelors. They had small kitchen areas with small bar fridges. My furniture consisted of a single bed and one those round basket chairs. The rent was $85.00 per month. The building was brand new in 1965. An odd lady with a big parrot lived next door. I was only 18 at the time and and I threw a few parties there. I'm not sure if it was the parties or the high rent that forced me to move along.
The address of the original Royal Bank on the southeast corner of Decarie and Queen Mary was 5294, but when it was decided to upgrade the premises, it was demolised around 1956, the new building shows up in Lovell's in 1957 addressed as 5292--the entrance moved slightly east. Too bad HQ had no idea that their new building was doomed to be demolished around 1964 for the "Depressway"; the next move being in the year 1965 to 5185 Queen Mary where the bank remains today.
Remember that there was another short street in Hampstead called Aumont which ran east off of Dufferin to end at a fence behind which was that private tram/bus road. Aumont itself was eventually closed and turned into another little park.
As for the corner of Victoria and Jean Talon being an alternate location for a Metro: there was never much commercial activity around that intersection, one reason being that the underpass beneath the nearby CPR tracks did not open until January 1960, and the only other businesses were mostly industrial, so presumably the most preferred choice was the one at Decarie due to the many restaurants nearby as well as the then-busy racetrack.
It is only in the past few years that the city decided to open up the Victoria/de la Savane "Triangle" to development, including condos, and I suspect this is because they had been forced to wait so long for the Blue Bonnets/Hippodrome property to be finally resolved once the racetrack closed down.
Those original 10-button TouchTone phones (minus the * and # buttons) were model 1500, succeeded by the 12-button 2500 made by Western Electric (U.S.) and Northern Telecom (Canada).
The Bell technician's callback test number "41091" was preceded for decades by "1191". It must have been sometime in the late 70s early 80s that it was replaced by a 7-digit number which the tech (and those in the know) dialed, then hung up to hear the ringback.
Lots of "phone phreak" stories, and many books, blogs, and websites on the subject.
I wonder if anyone else cares about all this stuff about the Bell and the science of Telephony?
Mr. Gravenor must have the patience of a God to read thru it before adding it to increasing conical pile of written verbiage.
Anyway, AFAIR the ring back number 1191/41091 worked only on Step by Step equipment, Cross Bar, as in HUnter 2 of the era, was rung back by dialing ( pressing from a Touch Tone ) 57 plus the last five digits of the telephone numbers, as in 572-xxxx in HUnter 2.
One ring back that worked when I was last in Toronto the Whatever was to dial the telephone number of phone you were on. Flash switch hook, Dial 4, then hang up. Phone should ring.
Anyway, in the Bell in the later S by S era the ring back number was 41091, which was a DOUBLE Ring with a short gap between.
The first part of the ring the pulses were on the 'Ring' side of the line pair. The Dial Tone was always on the Ring side of the pair, Ring to Ground.
The second part of the Double-length ring the pulses were on the 'Tip' side of the line, Tip to Ground.
On a 2FR Two-Party line there were TWO Subscribers SHARING a single wire pair from the Exchange to two separate physicals locations in the field with TWO separate telephone numbers and listings in the Directory.
Saved the Bell one pair of wires, and allowed telephone service when Plant Facilities were getting tight.
A Party Line was cheaper.
Now, so that the correct telephone instrument would ring when it's number was dialed, the telephones associated on a party line were connected with their respective ringers from one side of the line to Ground for a Ring Party on one telephone number.
The other associated party line telephone was wired with it's ringer Tip to Ground for a Tip party.
So, when the equipment in the CO completed the call, it sent the ringing pulses down the line on the Ring side for a Ring party telephone, and sent the ring pulses down the Tip side line for a Tip party, both to ground.
If the opposite party lifted his receiver when the first party was talking, he would hear the conversation, and vice versa.
Sharing, courtesy and discretion played a part in successful Party Line uses. Just like driving a car in traffic. Hmmmm.
Could get REALLY stupid, as one can readily imagine, especially if some of the folks on a party line MIGHT be deemed layabouts whom MIGHT have seemingly survived on Dow in Quarts and cigarettes by the carton.
Anyway, most often the two drop wires for the two separate subscribers on a 2-party line were Associated at the same terminal and binding posts in the same terminal in the field, one drop going to the Ring party residence and the other going to the Tip party residence.
Other times the Association was at TWO separate terminals down the cable where the pair was represented.
Occasionally the association was done in the exchange, which really did not save a pair, tho'.
The Installer or Repairman had to be VERY careful when working on party lines to keep Ring and Tip parties correctly indentified and wired regarding 'polarity', especially when the drops were out of the same binding posts in the same terminal way aloft on a pole swaying the the wind at eleven at night, pouring rain or blowing snow at -10 F.
A line transfer involving party lines to clear another pair for a burglar, fire or water flow sprinkler alarm, lets say, could be very tricky.
For the latter, the Installer was given a list of terminals where that pair carrying the Supervisory circuit was represented and he was to visit each location and place red caps on the binding posts or red plastic rings around the pair in PIC cable.
If, due to a transfer, two Ring parties had to be associated, one of the residences would have to be visited to rewire their phones into a Tip party. Much fun when THAT subscriber had not even called for a Bell visit.
Could get really tacky if the Installer lost track, in the dark and blinding rain 40 feet in the air, foot arches screaming on the pole or ladder steps, of which way the polarity was on the drops and mixed them up reversed on the binding posts.
Then both parties' phones would ring on a Ring party's pulses, and neither would ring when a Tip party pulses came down the line, let say.
Certain telephone sets would not be compatible for Automatic Number Identification ANI when wired for Tip Party service, and the actual telephone set in the residence would have to be substituted for a more modern 500 set wired for a Tip.
The Bell was then still supplying a 302/352 style as standard, with the 500 series instruments held back unless directed by Service Order, or on a Tip party.
Subscribers receiving a 500 'for free' on a transfer would gab amongst themselves, and everyone would then want one and surround the pole next time they saw an Installer aloft and nag, just what one needed when surrounded by clothes lines, dead drops never removed and figuring how to route a new drop around those towering rear grey sheds in alleys in older parts of town.
Dogs could be a pest, also, but were often brighter than their owners.
Squirrels chewed the cables, and travelled tree-to-tree on them, the Bell applying sticky goop to thwart them
Anyway.
If an Installer wired two telephone sets, one for a Ring and the other for a Tip party, and installed them on the same pair and dialed 1191/41091 and hung up, at first the Ring party instrument would ring, a pause, then the Tip party instrument would ring on the longer double ring, both phones ringing one after the other.
Some parties, to ring their associated party dialed 41091, both parties' phones ringing, when ringing stopped, both parties picked up and talked.
There were other ways of dialing your Party.
( If you wanted to ring only the Ring party phone you dialed 4106-6, to ring only a Tip, you dialed 4106-7.
If an Installer thought a house MIGHT have a second unauthorized extension telephone connected, it COULD be measured from the Test Centre if ringer still across the line, after disconnecting the primary set, you dialed 41091 on your Lineman's Test Set, ( Black Rubber, 1011B, I still have one ) and the illegal set MIGHT ring if wired in, bells still connected and bell clapper not blocked.
Red faces and throat-clearings, but, not always. Could get stupid if the subscriber hated the Bell, had been drinking, been made to look bad for non-payment, lost a wad gambling, just got out of jail, again, etc.
Getting a telephone set 'back' when the Subscriber did not pay their bill was tense, too!!
They would go nuts when they saw and heard you climb the pole, the sound rattling all the clothesline pulleys, the vibration telegraphing to the house where the other pulley was, to cut off service. )
To test the coin relay in a pay telephone there was yet another number the Installer dialed to actuate the coin relay in Step by Step. I have forgotten it, 1198??
This was dialed as last four digits as in HU 6-1198 if 1198 was indeed the number.
The exchange would then send out the pulses to operate the coin relay in the pay phone and it would go Click-Clack, Click-Clack.
Now, you could dial this number from ANY telephone and the exchange would send out the coin relay pulses which were audible in the receiver.
If you dialed the exchange in Ste. Therese from HUnter on Monkland with the coin relay test number let say, the call passing thru several Step exchanges on the way, you heard a very satisfying array of clicks and clacks as relays in the thru exchanges clicked and clacked in succession down the line back from the far exchange. Lovely in the days of Step.
In rural areas they had multi-party lines where the actual telephone ringers had to be changed to accept the ringing pulses sent out.
In small grocery stores or other small businesses the owner COULD have a Non-Dial extension phone wired in to the pay telephone circuit to accept incoming calls only on the pay phone, as long as the second telephone was visible from the pay phone.
If he wanted to call out, he used the pay phone.
Back in the day, pay telephone numbers often started the last four digits with '00' as in TRenmore 0067.
If a business had more than one line and telephone number, the numbers would be shown in advertising on billboards as, let say, Elwood 1186-7-8, and the exchange would automatically cascade the calls to the next open number if the other numbers were busy.
Around 1966, a friend of a friend--who happened to work for Bell--told me about the trick one could use to fool the phone company that you hadn't hooked up another phone to the line in your home: simply open up the phone and disconnect the yellow wire (the one actually connected to the bell itself); that way, presumably when the test centre rang your house, the load would show that only one phone was connected even if an extra one was.
It took many long years before the telcos in North America began to tolerate subscribers connecting extra phones in their homes when they were only paying their bill for one phone. I can see their point from the economic point-of-view, but it was virtually a victimless "crime", seldom emforced, and besides, if you had asked the installer to connect a four-pin socket in multiple rooms--so that you could unplug your single phone and move it from room to room, what was to stop that subscriber from purchasing extension phones from the numerous electronic and salvage-parts stores and hooking them up?
Telcos always said that they didn't like subscribers to hook up any old cheap phone that was not manufactured by Northern or Western Electric, giving the excuse that such third-party phone equipment might be unreliable and even defective--which was, in fact, often quite true.
Finally, around the 1970s, the telcos gave up nagging customers not to use "foreign" phones, so that today any old junk can be hooked up--and I do mean junk! Some grey-market Chinese phones you can buy in dollar and discount stores are so shoddy they shouldn't be allowed in the country, in my opinion.
I know that in 1970 BC Tel used Automatic Electric-type phones (the ones with the "snap-back" type rotary dials), yet when living in BC briefly I connected my Northern Electric phone and it worked fine.
Beginning with the 1962 telephone directory, subscribers' numbers began being listed as all-numerical: in other words, every directory up to 1961 would list your number as say: HU4-5678, but in 1962 it was printed as 484-5678. If you haven't already guessed, the reason for the switch was that the prefix names were rapidly being used up--mostly in the highly-populated U.S.--so that for newly-created exchanges such as with 954-5678, for example, there was no appropriate word or name available that could be substituted for that 95 prefix.
In the late 70s through the mid-80s, another phenomenon was brought to my attention: the "loop-line".
Perhaps it was some disgruntled telephone lineman who had been made to climb too many poles in sub-zero temperatures who spread the word that if you dialed say, 484-1194 and waited for a click, another person simulutaneously dialing 484-1195 would hook up with you, either deliberately or by accident.
Needless to say, such random connections generated much interest (boys meeting girls for blind dates, etc.), until the telcos got wind of this growing movement happening right under their noses so that they finally put an end to it; some of them even began charging a fee for this type of "dating service". CB radio operators would be speaking to strangers over the air and then be asked if they wanted to talk more securely over the loop-line. Alas, the loop-line is no more (as far as I know).
"The address of the original Royal Bank on the southeast corner of Decarie and Queen Mary was 5294, but when it was decided to upgrade the premises, it was demolised around 1956, the new building shows up in Lovell's in 1957 addressed as 5292--the entrance moved slightly east. Too bad HQ had no idea that their new building was doomed to be demolished around 1964 for the "Depressway"; the next move being in the year 1965 to 5185 Queen Mary where the bank remains today."
I remember the 5292 bank very well. Our Iona School Gr. 4 class were invited to tour that bank branch in the 1950's. After touring the vault we were shown (and allowed to touch) a Canadian $1000 bill. Also, my dentist (Dr. Kruger) had an office above the bank. He was old-fashioned in his procedures. He never froze before drilling, and didn't do x-rays. He thought that both were unhealthy. He either filled, or pulled, based on a visual inspection.
I remember that earlier bank (#5294) had a pharmacy next to it. The pharmacy would attach a vertical row of ViewMasters on the inside of their window. Every week they would advance the reel in the ViewMaster, and I would press my forehead against the glass to view the various images, which to me were quite magical, being in 3-D. After viewing, my mother would take me to Peggy's for a 1/4 lb of cashews, or the Woolworth's for a malted milk, or a Lowney's Cherry Blossom.
I heard that Jean Coutu's first job as a pharmacist was in that particular drugstore, next to 5294 Queen Mary Rd.
Back in the Sixties there was this radio DJ at CFCF 600 named Dave Boxer and he liked to play games with the Bell.
When on the Air, he would say to all the pimple-popping teens listening in and say 'Lets play Dial A Boxer Buddy!! and then give out the telephone number for CFCF on the air.
On the count of three about 10 thousand teens would grab their telephones and Dial CFCF.
The Exchanges went nuts in Step by Step and hundreds of calls got mis-directed as the switches jammed, two crossing at once EVERYWHERE and then there would be a stranger on your line also trying to get thru.
Word went around inside the Bell that the exchanges all over the area would suddenly go nuts all at once, the big Gong would start chiming and the coloured trouble lights at each end of the equipment racks would all light up at once.
From 50 calls a minute to thousands on a quiet evening at a big exchange like CRescent.
Often several times an evening.
Amps would rise, and the CO men would run around like squirrels amongst the racks clearing faults.
Finally someone figured that all the calls were trying to get thru to CFCF and some Bell employees played an AM radio in a few of the exchanges when Boxer did it again on the Air.
The exchanges went nuts on the count of three.
Finally high-level Bell management witness the exchanges seizing up first hand, blocking many other important calls and tying up the City and area.
Heavy pressure was brought to bear on CFCF to have Boxer cut it out, or Bell would deny CFCF service.
I'm not sure what the current ringback number is, but I know that as of 2010, the ANAC was 959-1164. It may still be, but I hear they change it occasionally. Anyone know?
There are several 958- and 959- numbers, some are backdoors to 911 so don't fart around too much with them.
When 98 CKGM was in its top-40 heydey, they ran contests that almost crashed the phone system. I recall my late aunt wanting to call in to a contest in 1971-72. She was at a payphone, put a dime in, got a very crackly dial tone, began calling 790-0444 ('GM's number at the time) then found herself connected to three other people also trying to get through. She would have been calling from the territory of the REgent exchange at the time. Pretty crazy.
The 790- prefix is served out of the LAfontaine exchange on Papineau.
I love all these stories.
I own a NE model 302, a few 500's, a 2500, an early (hard-wired) Contempra, and an NE butt set. They all work beautifully. The one that I have in active service now is a shiny black NE 500. Oh that ring!
Chuckling old Dave Boxer notwithstanding, he didn't hold a candle to CKGM 980's Pat Burns (the call-in host of "The Hotline", not the Canadiens former coach).
Burns showed up in Montreal in 1965 after having already made a name for himself on Vancouver's CJOR as a controversial talk-show host there for many years (in the Joe Pyne tradition) and quickly became the bane of Quebec separatists whom Burns routinely attacked and lambasted over the air.
Anyway, Burns was very popular, especially with women listeners who loved his deep and sultry voice-delivery. Nevertheless, he irked some people so it wasn't long before one or more of them began trying tie up Burn's phone lines by simply dialing the first 6-digits of CKGM's call in number, but not dialing the seventh number, which often succeeded in preventing any further calls from getting through to Burns, thus leaving a lot of air time filled with the "beep beep" of the busy tone.
Eventually, I suppose Bell figured out a way to untangle the mess so that particular trick wasn't as effective anymore.
One thing, though: I wish we had more real fighters like Burns back on the air. Today's call-in hosts are basically milketoast wimps with plenty of hip knowledge but little guts when it comes to taking a stand.
In the Bell, the unofficial word was that 'The Subscriber' was ALWAYS RIGHT!
The Union man out in the field did not always agree, as he alone dealt with 'The Subscriber' in all his/her glory.
One rainy cold afternoon I went on a Service Order to install a second line and telephone at a residence in the Queen Mary-Cote de Neiges area near the Wax Museum on the REgent exchange.
The house on the order, account the slope of the Mountain was quite a bit higher than the house behind on the next street over, the pole and terminal serving both houses in the rear, no alley.
The pole was stepped, Lead Cable NF 16 Terminal.
First move was to install a drop wire from the house to the pole and terminal.
Bonus! There had been a second line in the house before, and a drop was already up!! saving much work as the rain pelted down.
I put on my Body Belt and went up the pole to the terminal.
Now a problem appeared.
Just above the NF 16 Terminal, whose cover slid up to expose the Binding Posts inside was a clothesline and pulley on a hook screwed into the pole itself, prohibiting the terminal cover from being raised.
The terminal was situated so I faced the house on the service order, the clothesline passing above my head to the house behind on the next street a half lot over as the pole was not directly behind that house.
A long clothesline!!!
The rain pelted down.
So, I had to loosen the line, which was tight, unhook the pulley and line and rehook it on a pole step, and back out the hook with Lineman's Pliers.
First I had to get slack in the rope, so I pulled the clothesline along, as the slack adjuster was at the house end, per usual.
AS SOON AS I moved the rope, the pulley screeched as needed oil.
A nanosecond later the back door of the house the line went to slammed opened and this shrill voice told me in no uncertain terms to Leave Her Line ALONE!!
I said I had to move it to open the terminal and would put it back when done.
I did not bother to inform her that the Bell did not permit unauthorized attachments to their poles, etc., as it would be a waste of my time.
I got some slack in the rope, unhooked 'her' pulley and hooked onto a pole step.
She started to Scream! Her husband knew Alexander Graham Bell, and Watson, TOO! I would lose my job. Mayor Drapeau was over for dinner the night before, they owned Fifty-Thousand Bell Shares and so on.
She started to grab and shake the clothesline at HER end, this sending waves back and forth in the rope.
I was scared the pulley at my end would jump off the step and go flying into the next yard in a tangle of rope.
The yelling and noise brought out the neighbours and everyone was getting a free show!
The rain pelted down.
Definite contender for the Four-Letter-Word-for-a-Female-Orifice-of-the-Year award.
The rain pelted down and finally chased her in.
I tested the pair and connected the drop to the house, all the time thinking.
A LIGHT CAME ON in my head. Click!
I looked over my shoulder and could see her beaky nose parting the drapes in the window.
I took the hook, which was LONG and required 12 or 14 turns to remove, and screwed it in about an inch and a half, then 'faking' the rest of the turns as my body hid the hook from her house, and put the pulley and clothesline back on, and climbed down.
So, sometime later, under a full load of wet sheets and unmentionables on a windy day the hook would come out and all the laundry would fall to the ground in the neighbours yard.
Colin Paterson: Well, then you’re a much older fart than me, because when you lived in the 5480 Queen-Mary appartment building, I was playing in the huge backyard behind 5482...
I used to look at the huge 6-7 story appartment building in the back, and thought "it must be great to live in such a building"… (40 years later when I "finally" did, I actually liked it).
Anyone remember a small shop on Decarie corner of Van Horne called Garland's? In 1960s I was a little kid my mom took me shopping there. I also remember Woolworth and Steinberg's someone mentioned.
Lovell's Directory for 1961 lists Garland Meat Market at 6210 Decarie and Garland Stationery & Coffee Shop at 6190, all on the northwest corner at Van Horne.
I remember Chubby's Restaurant was at 6190 Decarie during the late 1950s although I never ate there myself.
To summarize, it was perhaps the wiser choice to build the de Namur Metro where it is exists rather than at Victoria and Jean Talon, although as of the date of this posting (Dec. 24, 2017) the Triangle complex of condos, commercial outlets, and green space at the latter-mentioned intersection has still yet to be completed due to an ongoing property-line dispute. A more frequent scheduling of bus route 92 along Jean Talon would help matters.
See this 1947 aerial map grid of where Jean Talon West (previously named de Namur) terminated and swerved north into de la Savane.
Left-click toggle the map for a full-sized view and you will see a clearer picture of a creek running west of and parallel to de la Savane. From de la Savane this creek would wind its way north eventually to link up with Raimbault Creek about which there are a few websites.
Decades earlier, this tributary zig-zagged its way alongside where Cote des Neiges Road would later be built, its source being a small lake approximately at its southwest intersection with Queen Mary Road.
The creek alongside Cote des Neiges eventually became so polluted that it was placed into pipes as was the remainder of Raimbault Creek itself in the late 1960s. It ran mostly through Ville St. Laurent ultimately to empty from Raimbault Park into the Riviere des Prairies. Its path can easily be followed in the 1947 collection of map grids.
Backtracking through this thread, for the benefit of telephone historians, as of March 29, 1952 Montreal payphones required 10 cents to place a local call. For 60 years up until then a local call was only 5 cents.
See the rate change announcement in the Montreal Gazette of March 28, 1952 page 17 "Payphones Demand 10c Tomorrow".
Other Canadian cities were likewise affected as it had in the U.S. during the previous months.
Love to get comments! Please, please, please speak your mind ! Links welcome - please google "how to embed a link" it'll make your comment much more fun and clickable.
This looks like the northwest corner of Decarie and Queen Mary,
ReplyDeleteHowdy!
ReplyDeleteDude the street sign says "Decarie." My bet is the North West corner of Decarie & Queen Mary.
SE corner of Decarie & Queen Mary?
ReplyDeletea naughty moose:
ReplyDeletedecarie and queen mary ?
That brings back many memories, Corner Queen-Mary and Decarie, the cigar store, can guess who that picture comes from, HaroldRO, Snowdon boy
ReplyDeleteSnowdon Junction.
ReplyDeleteSeen from another angle : http://img828.imageshack.us/img828/2752/joncsnowdon.jpg
Northwest corner Queen Mary and Decarie.
ReplyDeleteNorth-West corner of Queen Mary and Decarie
ReplyDeleteI had coffee there this morning, started searching on Sherbrooke before I said to myself, lets see if there is an answer already before I waste anymore time.
ReplyDeleteWould love to see more old pictures of this part of town, especially some of those old buildings between Queen Mary and Cote St. Luc. Very curious to learn what the east side of Decarie looked like before the trench was dug.
Oh wow!!! As soon as I saw this photo without looking at any of the shop signs or reading the comments, I thought "Queen Mary and Decarie"! I worked at Viva (the clothing shop on Queen Mary) for several years in the 90's, and you can see the building where Viva is now, in the photo.
ReplyDeleteLOL, there's Larry's shoe store too!! I remember when that closed down about the mid 1990's. I bought some shoes there at their closing sale.
Snowdon Junction as covered previously on 'Coolopolis'.
ReplyDeletePhoto dated Feb. 21, 1904.
Info from Montreal's Electric Streetcars. Binns.
Looking North on Decarie from Q.M.
http://coolopolis.blogspot.ca/2010/03/snowdon_02.html
Thank You.
Decarie Blvd. - Part One:
ReplyDeleteUp until 1964 when the Decarie Expressway excavation began, Decarie Blvd. itself from Cote St. Luc to Queen Mary Rd. was
narrower that from Queen Mary northward. The east side avenues such as Dalou and Saranac were longer than they are currently
because some of the end duplexes were demolished in order to widen Decarie to match its width from Queen Mary northward.
On Queen Mary Rd. itself there was relatively new Royal Bank at the southeast corner of Decarie, but it too was demolished
and in 1965 reopened in a brand new building on Queen Mary between Mountain Sights and Westbury Avenues.
Vintage photos show the tram lines (and later bus lines now on a paved road which replaced the tram tracks) which ran in an
exclusive right-of-way down the centre of Decarie north of Queen Mary Rd. Garland Terminus opened in 1949 at 6340 Decarie
(its tramline's electrical power house at 6310. This terminus was built to alleviate the horrendous steadily-increasing
traffic jams at Queen Mary and Decarie between trams, cars, and trucks. When the tram era ended in 1959, busses replaced
them from Garland and it later closed around 1964-65, I believe. The terminus was replaced by an apartment building--Le Castel Blanc--at 6280 Decarie.
How many of the residents there even know that a tram and bus station existed where they live today?
Up until the summer of 1959, the twin tram lines then swerved over to the west side of Decarie around Vezina to
the west of the underpass beneath the CPR railway tracks, the trams using a unique trestle-overpass to cross them;
tram route 17 (and later bus) running through Ville St. Laurent and terminating in Cartierville near where the current bus
route 64 ends just south of Gouin Blvd. near the former Belmont Park playground which itself later closed down the due to
competition from La Ronde.
But, back to the east side of Decarie between Lacombe and Cote St. Catherine Rd.: many apartment buildings (including the car
dealership Decarie Motors) which had been built in the 1940s and 50s were unnecessarily demolished, I suspect because there
may have been a preliminary plan to run the still non-existent Metro line underneath Decarie, and the city wanted to gobble
up the properties before the owners got wind of any such plan. Only a suspicion, however.
Great information. Where can I find old pictures of the Royal Bank before it was demolished ?
DeleteDecarie Blvd. - Part Two:
ReplyDeleteIn any event, from 1980 the Metro Orange Line eventually opened, running several blocks
to the east of Decarie mostly beneath Victoria Avenue instead, the stations opening one by one from Snowdon to de Namur at
which point it then did in fact run alongside Decarie Blvd. and eventually all the way to Cote Vertu. I can only assume that
someone in City Hall or the Metro Planning Dept. made the decision for the Orange Line to serve the more highly-populated
residential area to the east of Decarie than those mostly duplexes to the west.
Subsequently, the empty lots of those demolished apartment buildings between Lacombe and Cote St. Catherine were built upon
with the currently-existing gas stations (too many, really!) and some newer apartment blocks with commercial establishment on
their ground floors.
Today, several vintage photos of the area can be seen in the window of the photo shop on the northeast corner of Decarie
and Queen Mary Rd. That Nu-Way tobacco shop/newsstand on the corner was there for decades, and it was a shock to local
patrons when it closed. I was myself a regular to that newsstand for decades as well. To its west, in the 50s and 60s, there
used to be Peggy's Nut Shop from beneath whose window was (and I believe, still is!) a grill-vent from which the strong
smell of roasted nuts used to waft! Further west was Queen Mary Hardware (later a Rona), a small branch of Morgan's (later
renamed The Bay), and the Woolworth's--now a Jean Coutu.
The TD Bank on the Northeast corner of Queen Mary and Decarie closed a few years ago and became a Quebec Liquor outlet.
Directly north of that was Miss Snowdon restaurant, upon whose roof for many years was a huge Humpty Dumpty Potato Chip
billboard-type sign; the arms and legs moving back and forth, the eyes winking. Then, there was a Dack's Shoe shop, and
further up the famous Snowdon Tavern which burned down on a New Year's Eve back in the 1980s.
That's my neighbourhood!!
ReplyDeleteQueen Mary & Decarie.
I love these old pictures and the stories from the people that grew up in the area.
I'm a recent (10 years) transplant from the 'burbs. This is one of the best places in the city to live!
No mistaking Decarie & Queen Mary, although the "British Consols" (rather than Nu-Way Tobacco) kinda threw me a bit. We used to get the Star at Joe Black's newsstand in Nu-Way. Every day except Sunday. That was reserved for the New York Journal-American, Sunday News, and Sunday Mirror, also from "Black's"...
ReplyDeleteI used to kinda dread going for the paper because every once in a while Mr.Black would send me (almost) next door to Cape's drugstore, where another Joe, the fellow who had the lunch counter there would mutter "Son-of-a-bitch!" whenever I asked for "Mr.Black's special drink" which was just seltzer. There was never any charge for it: Mr.Black always warned me not to let lunch counter Joe try to charge. Not that Joe B. couldn't afford his seltzer water: Story in the neighbourhood was that he was a pretty successful bookie, owning "all those" apartment buildings running up Decarie from Snowdon to Cote St.Luc. Anyways, Mr.Black had plenty of us kids delivering papers to godforsaken areas like Hampstead in return for comic books and whatever tips we got. I found a bit later (from another "delivery boy") that I should riffle through the paper, and checking out what was in the envelope tucked inside. My informant claimed we were delivering bet payments, and a quick peek combined with a mention of how much was in there could boost a quarter tip to a few dollars. Never had the guts to do that, but sometimes the tips were surprisingly good for delivering a ten-cent paper from just a few blocks away.
A couple of doors North, on Decarie, were two stores that shared an entrance-way: "Natalie", a hat shop owned by a Mrs.Houle, and a jewelry store owned by her husband. I bought a Heuer watch from Mr.Houle for something like $125 around 1967/68. It was only a few bucks cheaper than a Rolex, but I preferred it because the Rolexes were just so gaudy.
I got a kick out of that watch one day when I was with my mom in Margolese's jewelry shop on Queen Mary at Earnscliffe, in that little two-story building that's still there, surrounded by the high-rise built up in the late sixties. I neede a new watchband. Mrs.Margolese ( pretty nasty old biddy) looked at my watch and commented that I had some nerve bringing a piece of junk like that into her establishment. Soft-spoken Mr.Margolese just glanced at my watch and said to his wife "Woman, this is an excellent quality timepiece. I suggest you remain silent, and stop making a fool out of yourself, until you learn to recognize such things."
I never minded getting dragged in there to pick up rings, brooches, and whatnot after that.
Parting note:
There's a Metro grocery store on Queen Mary between Trans Island and Mountain Sights (just East of Decarie). The Eastern half of that store used to be a Steinberg's. The Western half was a Zeller's. Zeller's was a pretty boring store, except they had a real, live monkey in the basement pet department. Upstairs from the store was the head office of the entire Zeller's chain. I think they only moved out of there (to the old Bell Telephone building on Decarie and Isabella) when they hit around 100 stores.
Next time, maybe I'll tell you about Leo Belanger, and why just about every kid I knew hated him, despite him being a really nice guy...
I also remember Peggy's nut store and the aroma. Quite a warm inviting smell when you were actually freezing your own nuts off outside in the cold weather.
ReplyDeleteWasn't there a Maury Heft's clothing store in the same block in the 1960s?
@URBAN LEGEND - Thanks for the memories. Used to love going to Black & Orange , with my Gramps , to get a new book , then over to Cape's Drugs for lunch at the counter.
ReplyDeletere: Archies Successor
ReplyDeleteThanks for your memories of Joe Black and Nu-Wat Tobacco Shop. I remember him well. Always very gruff. I heard that he died while watching a hockey game on TV at his girlfriend's place.
I'm guessing that the Archie in your name refers to Archie Wilensky, who ran Snowdon Pocket Novels on Dalou, Decarie near Musset (now Snowdon), and Decarie near Isabella for years?
re: Colin Patterson
Morrie Heft closed about 7 or 8 years ago. It was on the south side of Queen Mary, between Decarie and Circle Road. Towards the end, it was owned by a former salesman and his son. I still have some of their sport jackets in my closet.
re: ndgguy
When I was much younger, I would head to Black and Orange for my school supplies. I remember the owner, a tall guy with slicked black hair who never smiled, who scared me more than Joe Black across the street. They ran a lending library from the store where one could "rent" books for 5 cents a day.
I used to regularly visit Archie's Pocket Novels & Comics on the east side of Decarie near Lacombe to browse, buy and sell comics, magazines, and soft cover books, often finding some pretty rare stuff, too. I remember going in the day his wife
ReplyDelete(or was it his daughter?) said that Archie had passed away. Someone else later ran the place, I believe, but not for very
long.
Nello's Pizza on Decarie and then his brother's Leaning Tower of Pizza were popular in the neighbourhood. There was a Dionne
supermarket on the east side of Decarie just south of Queen Mary--demolished to make way for the "Depressway".
To the east of the Black & Orange book store on Queen Mary, there was also a Dalfen's which had a small record department. My aunt once took me in there when she wanted buy the latest 78 rpm hit record, "Fever" by Peggy Lee--which I later inherited and still have today! West of Black & Orange was Tops Barber Shop.
Further east on Queen Mary between Mountain Sights and Westbury Ave., a new Royal Bank branch opened with exquisite white marble
floors and counters in the brand new building which replaced a single large older apartment building.
Futher east of where the Snowdon Metro is today, there was the Black and White variety store (today called depanneurs). The old couple proprieters were usually sour-faced and grumpy and, if I recall, were angry when they were presumably forced out during the Metro station excavation and construction. In any event, another depanneur replaced them which still exists today.
Richstone's Bakery, Gerry Snyder's Sport Shop, etc. were further east. The Snowdon Medical Building at 4950 Queen Mary was highly-touted when originally proposed and built, but seems to have been a monumental flop over the successive years. Various other businesses moved into it, including Sun Life Insurance and a Commerce Bank for awhile. A dreary, dismal place today!
About horse-drawn vehicles: the last one I ever saw on Trans Island was early in 1956--a trash wagon! Up until then, I would on rare occasion see horse-drawn commercial wagons--as well as tourist's caleches, of course--elsewhere in the city.
Guaranteed Pure Milk dairy had them for years, as I'm sure did other dairies, bakeries, etc.
Apparently one of the very last horse-drawn commercial vehicles was used by a grocer downtown somewhere around Lincoln and
what is today de Maisonneuve. The horse was named Dobbin.
I also remember the ice man up until about 1955, who with his metal tongs would haul huge chunks of ice to a little old lady on Maplewood who must have been one of the very few owning an icebox and who didn't yet own a refrigerator by that date.
MP&I will surely know more about horses in the city than I.
By the way, tram fare for children was 5 cents up until around 1959. Phone booth calls in that era were 10 cents, a quart of milk 25 cents, bottle of coke 10 cents, etc. Life was less complicated back then and less expensive!
Urban Legend:
ReplyDeleteMr. Lew and his wife were the owners of Black and White Stationary store. Their daughters and their daughters' husbands also worked in the store, so it was a real family business.
You can see Mr. Lew talking about how he first opened the store in the first two minutes of this National Film Board film: "Our Street Was Paved With Gold"
http://www.nfb.ca/film/our_street_was_paved_with_gold
Other stores I remember on Queen Mary south, east of Decarie were Chenoy's Deli (later Manny's) and Cape's Drugstore.
A very compelling film, indeed.
ReplyDeleteI often visit Fairmount Bagel for a couple of "white seed" and then walk down St. Lawrence to Mont Royal Avenue to soak up the atmosphere.
Have you read "St. Laurent, Montreal's Main", by Pierre Anctil? Publisher: Septentrion 2002ISBN 2-89448-327-9
Website:
http://www.septentrion.qc.ca/english-books/featured-titles.asp
Also: "City Unique", by William Weintraub. Publisher: Robin Brass Studio Inc.
Website:
http://www.robinbrassstudio.com/
For great vintage photos both black and white and in colour, along with historical descriptions, see the
"Collection Pignon sur rue" series of booklets published by the City of Montreal back in the 1980s, and now surely available at our largest libraries.
Urban Legend said: "I can only assume that
ReplyDeletesomeone in City Hall or the Metro Planning Dept. made the decision for the Orange Line to serve the more highly-populated
residential area to the east of Decarie than those mostly duplexes to the west"
In deed there was a big fight at City Hall and in the neighbourhood. Ultimately the planners changed the route to run up Victoria in that stretch rather than Décarie.
I have a post here about the decision to put the Namur metro station at Decarie rather than Victoria. http://bitly.com/VbWcv6
ReplyDeleteHi Harold! I believe we had some correspondance a few years back about Snowdon, starting with Archie, and evenually rambling off into my apparently endless blathering about restaurants I've known and loved. Hope everything's ticking along OK for you nowadays.
ReplyDeleteNow I'll tell everyone why all the kids I knew around Coolbrook/Queen Mary hated Leo Belanger:
Leo and his family lived in a stand-alone cottage on Coolbrook just across the driveway from the Bank of Montreal on Queen Mary. They were quite well-to do. At one time they were said to own something like 45 or 50 taxis.
Anyways, we hated Leo because we all used to play cowboys & Indians (Natives & Imperialists?) all over the neighbourhood, especially in the huge area behind the old apartments that ran along Decarie from the back of the Queen Mary buildings to where Wendy's is now. It was a great playground: a bit of a hill in the middle, plenty or rubble, bramble bushes and even a couple of sheds. Perfect terrain for a bunch of rambunctious little commandoes. The only thing that could make it better would be ditching those lame cap guns with that ugly string of red paper coming out the top in favour of ...BB guns!
But we weren't allowed to have BB guns, not even if we promised not to shoot an eye out like Leo did. Several people I've known were quite friendly with Leo, everyone saying he's a pretty nice guy. I only met him once or twice myself. I don't even know if he really did shoot out an eye, but that's the story all our parents gave as the reason we couldn't have BB guns. It was all Leo's fault. And so we hated him.
Anyways, Urban Legend, you mentioned Archie's store on Decarie at Lacombe.
Archie died in that store, around 1971. His sister, Sylvia, inherited and operated it until about 1986 when I bought it from her. I had it for a few years, until the landlord decided to double the rent. It was pretty marginal anyways, Sylvia said it was only profitable because she had a few big customers for soft porn novels. Good enough, but not good enough to cover twice the rent. I really only bought it out of sentiment anyways: I'd helped Archie build the shelves there in the mid-sixties, and when Sylvia put it up for sale 20 years later, I just couldn't let the old place die, even though I always disliked it- uncomfortable place, 40' deep and 8' wide. I much preferred/loved his first store on Dalou, and even the one on Decarie near Dionne's was better.
Anyways, enough of this: I feel a dose of endless keyboard hammering coming on, and I better cut it out before it goes nuclear.
I'll leave you guys with a link to a little site from an NDG real-estate broker. Not the greatest, but it's full of little bits, pieces, and photos of NDG's history:
http://www.n-d-g.ca/english/?page_id=19
Take it easy
-AstroPaul (aka Archie's Successor)
Service was once the motto of The Bell Telephone Company of Canada and this word once was found in the centre of the Bell in their circular logo.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, when we moved from Snowdon to NDG, there were 'No Plant Facilities', as the Bell would put it, and we had to wait a few weeks for a telephone, and then had to share a Party Line for a short time thereafter.
Not the Bell's fault.
Too many people, too many moves in the boom of the Fifties, after the War.
Schools took a while to catch up, also.
Our Snowdon number was ELwood.
The new number in NDG was DExter, Becoming HUnter 4, then 484 after 7-digit dialing came in.
There was a WAlnut in addition.
The Exchange on Monkland between Hingston and Hampton across from the 'Y' occupied only the Eastern part of the block thru 1950-51, then was expanded West to front the whole block on Monkland.
Worked there for a time, routining Line Finders, Selectors and Connectors as Step-by-Step was disappearing,
The Dial Tone, and others, created within rotating metal discs partly-filled with mercury.
Hunter 2 was already Cross Bar with Touch Tone available.
The first push button telephones had only 10 buttons.
Step-by-Step switching soon to follow steam locomotives and the streetcars that used to run along Monkland into history.
Just before all-number dialing was complete, the last two NEW Named numbers in the area were TRiangle and OXford.
A S by S Exchange running full-out was NOISY and took 3000 Amps @ 48 V.
The alarm gong with metal bars and an electric solenoid hammer similar to those found in a Xylophone, ringing out the troubles to be cleared by the CO men.
I miss the old Bell crest, and the green trucks with the red wheels.
From paper-wrapped pairs within a pressurized lead sheath to PIC cable and BL-OR-GN-BR-SL WH-RD-BK-YL-VT.
' No job is so important and no service is so urgent...etc.'
Ah, Well, what might have been.
Thank You.
Hopefully, someday a Steve Jobs-type successor will find way to plug our brains into the computer so that we can finally dispense with all of this keyboard activity (voice-control apparently still not yet perfected a la Star Trek!),
ReplyDeletebut, to the subject at hand:
It is unacceptible that too many landlords can legally jack up the rents of commercial establishments seemingly to whatever they wish with no Rental Board limitations, as is the case with residential tenants who do have some recourse.
In particular, Monkland Avenue has in recent years been ravaged by such greed, driving out popular establishments and, I believe, even the Provigo left for that reason--replaced by an overpriced restaurant!
No more major supermarket for that densely-populated district!
MP&I...I didn't know you were a "phone phreak"... ;-)
ReplyDeleteAnyway, Elwood was the actual name of the central office building on Monkland corner Hampton, ELwood being one of the first prefixes used in NDG.
Do you remember what was the last year when a local call from a pay phone was 5 cents? Certainly early 50s.
I know for a fact that there were still some 6-digit residential and business phone numbers in service in 1956; probably their final year, though.
You should find the following websites of great interest. However, be prepared to spend several months wading through the second one:
http://jbb.poslfit.com/Pages/514.html
http://www.phworld.org/network/
On a busy calling period, say a Thursday evening, an old SxS switch sounded like hail pelting on a tin roof. Contrast that to a quiet early Sunday morning when you could hear an individual call set up.
ReplyDeleteIn 1966-67 Northern Electric launched the first semi-computerized switched. 1979 saw the launch of Northern's DMS fully solid-state switch.
Interesting (to those having technical interest in such matters) about telephone evolution.
ReplyDeleteHow many remember when anyone could call anyone waiting at a pay phone?
Unfortunately, by the mid to late 80s, due to criminal activity-- including drug dealers consistently hanging around pay phones, etc., (in the days before they used pagers and then cellphones)--most phone companies around the world blocked such incoming calls.
My only unanswered question regarding this is: does the Operator today still have that capability? Can she call me back if I hang up or become disconnected at a pay phone?
Operators are evasive whenever I've asked that question.
Has anyone ever received a call back from the Operator to the pay phone they were using?
Yes I recall walking by a payphone and heard it ringing. The last ones to do this were Northern's Centurion phones: http://www.phworld.org/payphone/nortel.htm
ReplyDeleteThe number of human operators is down to just a handfull, but they have software on their workstation that can control the phone remotely, in case you lose your money or something.
Interesting about the Operator being able to access pay phones. I always assumed that they could do so, but they just never admitted it.
ReplyDeleteI suppose the next gimmick is to remove the actual phone number from every pay phone and leave some sort of serial number visible which only the telco technician can understand as the phone's identifier.
There has been a suggestion that pay phones be reduced and even removed from public access entirely due to the obvious prevalence of cellphones, but I say NO because not everyone wants to bring their cellphone with them on vacation or rent one while away from home, but still may need to make a call.
In New Zealand I once found someone's lost cellphone on a bench and took it to a tourist information kiosk to be returned.
I worked at Bell Canada for many years, ending somewhere around 1993 and I never heard of a trick an operator could use in order to make a pay phone ring.
ReplyDeleteI am assuming that you know the reason that the phone company disabled their ability to receive calls?
Yes, Kristian, I stated the reason further up this page, but in a nutshell: abuse by criminals, who would hang around pay phones to do their drug deals, etc.
ReplyDeleteDecades I'd seen a few documentaries about how scammers in the U.S.A virtually made their living at payphones, so I imagine the telcos finally wanted to stop the "bad press" and shut them down.
This is, however, a subject in which you can delve very deeply.
Um, no the reason the phone companies disabled the ability to receive phone calls at phone booths is because people were accepting collect calls on them. We had a very elaborate checking system for every single call that came in. The fourth digit was almost always a 9 or a 0. Nonetheless we had to "check for coin" at "rates and routes" for every single request and that other operator's job all day long was simply to look up those numbers in a big book to see if they were pay phones.
ReplyDeleteMust have been a lot of collect calls for the telcos to finally realize after around the 60 or 70 years of the existence of pay phones that they were being scammed out of money.
ReplyDeleteSurely they must have had the technology to block such incoming collect calls from connecting to pay phones which are clearly identifiable by their number?
It IS possible that this was the final "straw that broke the camel's back", but I still believe that criminal activity was of more concern once the law enforcement authorities put pressure on them.
I would like to read the testimony of telco engineers to know what they knew.
When working for the Bell in the Sixties, the coin collector ( pay telephone ) we were installing was a rotary-dial black unit called a 233HS with a coin chute at the top in sized holes for 5-10-25 cent denominations.
ReplyDeleteThe coins passed thru gates and chutes and went 'Ding' for a nickle, Ding-Ding for a dime and Bong for a quarter, striking a bell either once for a nickel, twice for a dime or a coiled spring-like chime for a quarter.
The Operator could hear the tones and count them up to the total cash requested on a toll call.
On a local call, the tones were still produced, but had no bearing on a local call.
A local 10 cent call could be made with a quarter if thats all you had, but, change not given back.
If the call went thru, after you hung up, a signal was sent over the wire pair from the Central Office to the telephone to 'accept' the coins into the removable coin receptacle in the bottom part of the phone, the relay operated and shunted and dropped the coins into the receptacle.
If the call did not go thru, the opposite signal was sent from the CO and the relay shunted and dropped the coin held back to the caller thru the coin return chute.
The Operator back then could accept or return coins with keys at her console.
She could also 'ring' the payphone if necessary.
Other telephone callers from payphones or NON-payphones could dial a payphone and it would ring.
On 'classic' pay telephones, the RINGER ( Bells ) and the Network for the audio part of the telephone were in a SEPARATE unit called a 'Subset'.
After Expo67, the Bell decided to eliminate the 'calling in' ability on certain pay telephones as they were being used for questionable motives.
One day I was sent out from 5757 with about 15 service orders, a box of placard holders, metal, and placards, glossy, black lettering on yellow in both official languages which said something like 'This pay telephone will no longer accept incoming calls.'
Most pay phones on the list were alone, but, one location, in the washrooms below ground at Place D'Armes had a bank of them with all sorts of sleazos orbiting around shifting from foot-to-foot, chain smoking and looking daggers as I mounted the placard holder and inserted the placard.
As I backed away, they hoarded in like hyenas to see what it said.
Then the noise began and they surrounded me, demanding in mists of spittle Why/Porquoi?
I shrugged and showed them the orange service orders and sidled to the stairs, Don't know/c'est pas!
The ringer signal came from the exchange and the bells, then COULD still be rung by the Operator or the Test Centre, as the bells were not removed or silenced in the field.
Glad that was over with.
To my dismay, a few days later, I received a note from my supervisor that 'I had NOT installed the prerequisite placard holder and placards at the Place D'Armes location' and they wanted to know why = possible discipline.
I went in and said that I HAD installed the placard holder and placard as per BSP and such.
Well, I was sent back to rectify this problem.
Same smell, same sleazos.
The placard WAS gone, but, not the holder.
The placards were designed to be changed monthly in some locations and it was not rocket science to slip them in and out, a small catch holding them in.
Someone had removed the placard, as if that would miraculously let the ring signal come thru from the CO.
So, I took the placard holder off the wall, put in the placard, and reinserted the screws into the anchors THRU the placard, holding it in, on the wall.
More groaning from the herded masses, but, grins, knowing the placard would be removed as soon as I left, or so they thought.
The Foreman went and checked and a day or two later asked me as to WHY I had put the screws thru the placard, as it did not look 'good' and I told him.
It went away.
Thank You.
Was our Bell susceptible to "phreakers"; call an 800 number, blast 2600 Hz, seize the trunk, or was only AT&T prone to this?
ReplyDeleteI worked as an Overseas Operator where many of the calls had a 3 minute $4/min minimum - ie $12 in coins had to be put into the slot if you wanted to call certain places, which was highly impractical.
ReplyDeleteI recall putting one Polish woman through to her family, with whom she hadn't spoken for many years. After her three minutes she stuck around and put the money in the slot even though she could have just walked away. You get a good impression of certain cultures in a job like that.
Supposedly if you were clever you cheat by playing a tape recording of the various coin noises into the microphone.
But as I said, I'm pretty skeptical that the phone authorities would care about dodgy people receiving phone calls, they might've worried that people receiving phone calls might have been bad for business because they didn't make money off those calls, which blocked legitimate customers.
The obsession with preventing collect calls from going to those lines was quite extreme and they went to great lengths to avoid it.
You could not make collect international phone calls to Canada from many countries, including India, Russia, etc, but also including Germany believe it or not.
The only pay phone I can recall in Montreal that was able to accept calls was in the Westmount Tavern on Greene and St. James, now a dentist office.
Number please? - part two:
ReplyDeleteFor the moment, however, never mind the Operator, who in any case resides on the lower rungs of the telco hierarchy. It is the test center engineer and linesman who can do way more with their network tools. Who among us at one time or another hasn't experienced a apologetic linesman accidently breaking into their conversation while performing his circuit tests? I once even somehow became linked into a conversation between two techicians who chattered away for the longest time without even knowing I was there; the dial-tone even still blaring away while they were speaking. Weird things happen.
So, depending on who you ask regarding the Operator's capability of calling a payphone: they either can, they can't, or won't ADMIT to knowing how because of company policy.
Besides, anyone reading this can perform a simple test: stand next to a payphone in a quiet spot, use your cellphone to call the Operator or Information and ask the nice lady to "please test my landline?" by calling you back, giving her the payphone's number, of course. See what happens--or doesn't. That should clinch it. Try both Bell and Telus payphones. Try it in different countries just out of curiosity. If I had a cellphone of my own I'd have done this myself years ago, obviously.
A little history: I first tried out a push-button (called "TouchTone" or DTMF) telephone at Vancouver's Pacific National Exhibition in 1965. The phone was hooked up to a screen--the Picturephone (with its black & white screen)--which had already been trotted out for the public's amusement at the 1964 World's Fair in NYC.
The first TouchTone payphone I saw was in 1966 at a Holiday Inn near Plattsburg. ("No Canadian Coins", the sign said...and they still say that today!). The first TouchTone payphones I saw in Montreal were those at Expo67.
On a rainy day, those interested can delve into Google for info about DTMF, Picturephone, etc. Enjoy! :-)
Number please? - part one:
ReplyDeleteThanks for the clarification, MP&I. Always an eye-opener to hear first-hand information!
As I mentioned elsewhere, one can delve very deep into the many dark corridors and catacombs of the telephone network, and there are countless books, blogs, forums, and websites one can immerse oneself in--yet still not know everything. Indeed, it is in the telcos own best interests to keep the public unaware of certain weaknesses in the system which could easily (and not so easily) be exploited.
Misinformation and disinformation is also rampant, with those in-the-know likely to lose their jobs should the system become compromised in any way--which, unfortunately it HAS on occasion.
How many remember when the Bell and the media announced a specific date when the 450 area code would be switched online to alleviate the burden being placed on our original 514? But, how many people noticed that the phone company deliberately jumped the gun by connecting 450 AHEAD of schedule without warning? The reason: they clearly wanted to make sure that hackers didn't try to disrupt the procedure. Sort of like the decoy Brinks truck trick.
But, with regards to my original question: CAN the Operator call a pay phone or not? Well, yes and no, depending on which
phone company we are talking about.
When AT&T was finally deprived of its monopoly in the U.S., start-ups such as Sprint had to scramble to find the talent to compete with "Ma Bell"--a daunting task, to be sure, and which all too often relegated Sprint's services to less-than-satisfactory, thus many former Bell subscribers who had hastily switched to Sprint went back to "Ma" for the reliability they had come to expect over many generations.
Telcos can be sneaky as well. Beginning in 1985 when the initial cellphone players were Bell and Cantel, how many subscribers discovered too late that only ONE of them offered the
*67 call-blocking feature, and unless you had asked up-front, you probably ended up wishing you had subscribed to the one that DID offer it. Surely today all cell providers offer *67?
ReplyDeleteIn my years at Bell Canada I frequently had the impression that they weren't exactly attracting the best and brightest.
I think this was because the money was just too easy for them for too long. $12 for 3 minutes for a call to India where you could barely hear - that was practically half a days wages back in the early 80s, immigrants were getting gouged by the phone system to stay in touch back home.
As phone operators we were definitely overpaid by today's standards, not that I'm complaining.
Telecommunications has advanced so incredibly since then, it's a pretty cool thing and consumers have really benefited.
The Bell brass seemed incapable of doing anything right. For example CEO Jean Monty, with his insufferable gregariousness, shiny bald head and banker's suit, would organize some sorta displays for the workers about the future of the company lying in video teleconferencing. Every one of these turned into a farce. There were glitches in the video and it turned into an embarrassing fiasco. I recall cringing at two of these events at least.
Then there were middle-managers who were dumber than a stick and god knows what they did in their cubicles. The old adage about 80 % of life was being on time was definitely true there. These managers would spend the entire day tabulating how many times you were four minutes late. Once you were there you could take off to the bathroom for quite some time without anybody noticing however.
Workers -- mainly women -- would go on burnout so often that in some offices half the staff would be gone, so there were always a lot of non-unionized part-time workers getting paid while many of the full-timers were collecting bogus burnout money.
When somebody higher-up pointed out that the female workers were really abusing the burn-outs, some union person really burnt his ass and denounced him for sexism.
I only recall Bell attracting one talented person to a management position and she really energized the office, but she didn't stay around long.
That bright young woman was replaced by a less-talented, older woman who once admonished me for dragging my feet on the office carpet when I walked. "C'est pas acceptable!" she shrieked at me.
I tried not to laugh.
That manager was soon gone from the company as well.
Nowadays whenever I'm in one of these offices crowded with unionized workers, techies sitting around chatting while on the clock, I always get the sense that it's just a matter of time before it goes down the drain.
Another pay telephone adventure and resistance to working.
ReplyDeleteBack in the Sixties the Pay Telephone Group worked out of 5757 Upper Lachine road and covered the whole area from Grenville/Hawkesbury thru to at least Joliette.
Lots of driving and you had better make sure you had the right materials when leaving, as not every Bell garage had pay telephone parts.
And a full tank of gas.
I had this service order to install a pay telephone in a booth at the NW corner of Sherbrooke and Marien in Montreal East.
The booth itself placed previously by G.M. Gest Construction, their 'yard' in La Salle on Dollard. From time to time you were sent to Gest to retrieve pay telephones and their coin receptacles brought in with a booth by Gest.
( There was a small 0-4-0T steam locomotive in the yard for a while once used by Gest on big jobs. )
The LaSalle DOminic Exchange on Clement was fairly new, then, and all Cross Bar, or so I was told.
Anyway, I get to the service station on Marien, ( No!, no Municipal traffic lights sequencing away on top of THIS one, as it was just a gas station. ) and there is a booth on the corner.
Cold, Windy, blowing snow, refinery smell.
First move, put up a drop wire from the booth mast to the terminal on the cable and strand, and strip and attach the copper wires inside to binding posts in terminal as per service order ( Cable 23 Pair 71 terminals 17 or whatever.
In PIC cable you used Skotch-loks to connect terminal wires to the proper pair in the terminal by colour code and terminate the drop onto a smaller 6-terminal block below the cable count which was exposed.)
'Rang thru' to the binding posts for my Pay Phone with 1011B test set from ANOTHER pair and shorted out my pair, proving the work was done in the exchange and out to terminal in the field.
Then I had to install a 6-foot 'Ground Rod' next to the booth for a Ground, as the coin relay depended on a Ground to properly accept/return coins.
This became the crux problem with this, and so many other jobs.
Rocks in soil, and frozen, too.
Took over a hour, moving the rod to various locations, and it still stuck out at the top end.
You had a heck of a time trying to hit the top of a 6-foot rod vibrating at eye level with a hammer.
You Nicopressed the booth ground wire to the ground rod wire with a special tool.
Hydro for the booth light had their own ground and we could not use it.
You could Not run a second drop back to the cable strand for a ground. But, some did.
Installed the telephone and sub set and it worked, sorda!
ReplyDeleteGround no good, and booth surrounded by asphalt.
Cold, wind, snow, refinery.
Called test Centre for payphone test.
Shorted pair to measure resistance out and back on loop from exchange which was 30 ohms, lets say.
SO, the limit from the exchange to ground was 5? ohms additional, which would be half of 30 = 15 on one side of the line + 5 for ground.
Measured 25 or more, the ground test rejected by test centre and NO Okay number to sign off phone as not Okay for service, as it could not be counted on that the coin relay would work properly.
Time to cheat!! as the phone DID work and took coins. You did not put coin receptacle in until last in case you had to change the telephone and get at the mounting screws.
( The Bell got really WEIRD about pay phone money, and rightly so.
We were all 'Bonded'.
There were traps to catch Installers and coin collector folk who drove around taking full coin receptacles and replacing them with empty ones.
The full coin receptacles went to a coin processing facility off Pare at Decarie. Was there a few times watching them process coins by the TON! everything recorded to see how a payphone was 'doing' financially.
Each receptacle had a small seal holding it's latch shut, and a spring-loaded door closed over the coins inside as you pulled it out from the phone itself.
If you broke a seal off it looked BAD!!!
There were paper 'Overflow Envelopes' with gummed flaps for coinage that filled up to relay, causing it to jam, or coins that had spilled out of coin chutes into bottom of phone.
You filled in Telephone Number and Seal number on envelope and sent it in with coin receptacle.
There was a steel vault in the truck which held 13? receptacles, the key at 5757. )
So, when you wanted to cheat on the ground test you took warm water and dumped it down the ground rod which increased the conductivity, for a while.
ReplyDeleteThen it became Repairs' problem!
I went to gas station and got a bucket of hot water from rest room.
Dumped it down beside ground rod and around concrete pad the booth was on.
Waited, and did ground test again with test centre.
Still no good.
More water, another test.
The test centre guy said to stop pouring water on it ( he knew all the tricks!! ) put the phone Out of Service and tell Management.
GOOD! it was getting dark, the snow was increasing and I was FROZEN!!
Then I made a MISTAKE!!!!
I put an Out-of-Service metal sign over coin slots and screwed it on thru a hole in 10 cent slot, covering coin holes.
Then I put in vault door where coin receptacle would go. Each door had it's own KEY and serial number, = thousands of them cross referenced to telephone number in field.
BUT, figuring the telephone might have to be changed, did NOT put in a coin box, the sign on top preventing the phone from being used.
I let it go, and reported 'no ground' to Foreman.
A few days later I was called into the office and the door CLOSED! A BAD sign!!
He said they had been out to the phone at Marien and no sign over coin chute.
Furthermore there was MONEY inside where the coin box would go and they thought I was 'collecting it' for myself on the sly, dropping by from time to time to pay for coffee and lunch.
I HAD kept the vault door key, in case I had to change the phone. DUMB MOVE!
I said 'NO!' and told the whole story about the ground and the water.
I also said all my work since that day was out on the Lakeshore and Rigaud and would not have had TIME to get to Montreal East.
Besides, there was NO Okay number issued from the test centre and the phone was not to be used.
He went for it, and there was no Okay number, and this too went away.
Thank You!
Onto the various comments now:
ReplyDeleteUrban Legend & Sam Boskey : About the Métro line, it swerved east because the population was denser along Victoria than Décarie. And instead of the stops at Namur & De La Savane, there was supposed to be only one stop, at Victoria and De la Savane, and then on to Du Collège. But the line was relocated along Décarie because Robert Campeau, the real-estate magnage, had said that he was going to purchase the Blue Bonnets racetrack and build a few dozen high-rise towers, so the city figured it would be a good move to move the Métro line westward instead, so they built the Namur and De La Savane stations instead. And the high-rise project did not materialize until 40-45 years later (if it ever does)… Then it was discovered that it was just a bullshit ploy to have the Métro station built close to the racetrack; IIRC, some people went to jail for that (but definitely not Robert Campeau). Who else remembers the shuttle buses ran from the Jean-Talon Métro to the racetrack???
I calculate inflation in chocolate bars… When I was a kid, a chocolate bar was 10¢, and a big one was 20¢. They also had smaller ones at 5¢, but those disappeared in the early 70’s. So, whenever I see the price of something trivial, I say “hmmm, it’s x chocolate bars”…
Since we had a car, bus and Métro trips were few and far between, and an incredible treat, so whenever I hit on a dime, I was faced with a big dilemna: a bus ride or a chocolate bar???
So, today, a bus ride is about 3 chocolate bars.
Colin Paterson: The nut store always had stuck me as a ridiculously narrow establishment, akin to this one…
Montreal, Park & Island & Urban Legend: Regarding Bell Telephone, the HUnter exchange was the first in Canada to get DTMF (“Touch-Tone®”) dialing, around 1966 (the second served Expo’67), so we were the first to have button phones (back then, they didn’t have the * and # keys). This had a good side-effect: whenever we were sick, my mother would call the doctor and he’d be here within minutes, have a perfunctory look at us, then embark on the phone to make several phone calls, because he was served by the WEllington exchange that did not offer DTMF back then… We also have had a chime installed on the wall, so whenever someone called, the phone went “ding.....dong” instead of “drrrrrring”. But our doorbell went “drrrrrrring”, which confused me whenever we went to someone else’s because their phone rang like a doorbell and vice-versa…
When did “41091” stopped working to make your phone ring? I remember hearing about kids who jumped over a swimming pool fence in the winter, dialing “41091” on the phone, and having had the phone ring continuously through the rest of winter…
On my first serious job, I was working a on computer in a room which was right next to the PBX room, along with a phone phreak (since I was a train freak, he listened to my stories and I listened to his stories) who was always in the PBX room whenever the same tech showed up (we nicknamed him “papa Bell” because he did not hide behind company policy to chat about phone technology), and he came up often to change extensions and all that. I didn’t really care about the phone stuff, but it was nevertheless interesting. Years later, I was surprised to see him model railroading at the Canada Central…
Kristian Gravenor: You think phone company executives are stupid? Try cable companies!!!
emdx.....totally amazing.
ReplyDeleteThe apartment building on your google map (right here) next to the bus laneway....I rented an apartment there for several months in 1965. 2nd floor in front closest to the bus laneway.
The apartments were all 1 room bachelors. They had small kitchen areas with small bar fridges. My furniture consisted of a single bed and one those round basket chairs. The rent was $85.00 per month. The building was brand new in 1965. An odd lady with a big parrot lived next door. I was only 18 at the time and and I threw a few parties there. I'm not sure if it was the parties or the high rent that forced me to move along.
Amazing! Thanks for the google!
The address of the original Royal Bank on the southeast corner of Decarie and Queen Mary was 5294, but when it was decided to upgrade the premises, it was demolised around 1956, the new building shows up in Lovell's in 1957 addressed as 5292--the entrance moved slightly east. Too bad HQ had no idea that their new building was doomed to be demolished around 1964 for the "Depressway"; the next move being in the year 1965 to 5185 Queen Mary where the bank remains today.
ReplyDeleteRemember that there was another short street in Hampstead called Aumont which ran east off of Dufferin to end at a fence behind which was that private tram/bus road. Aumont itself was eventually closed and turned into another little park.
As for the corner of Victoria and Jean Talon being an alternate location for a Metro: there was never much commercial activity around that intersection, one reason being that the underpass beneath the nearby CPR tracks did not open until January 1960, and the only other businesses were mostly industrial, so presumably the most preferred choice was the one at Decarie due to the many restaurants nearby as well as the then-busy racetrack.
It is only in the past few years that the city decided to open up the Victoria/de la Savane "Triangle" to development, including condos, and I suspect this is because they had been forced to wait so long for the Blue Bonnets/Hippodrome property to be finally resolved once the racetrack closed down.
Those original 10-button TouchTone phones (minus the * and # buttons) were model 1500, succeeded by the 12-button 2500 made by Western Electric (U.S.) and Northern Telecom (Canada).
The Bell technician's callback test number "41091" was preceded for decades by "1191". It must have been sometime in the late 70s early 80s that it was replaced by a 7-digit number which the tech (and those in the know) dialed, then hung up to hear the ringback.
Lots of "phone phreak" stories, and many books, blogs, and websites on the subject.
I wonder if anyone else cares about all this stuff about the Bell and the science of Telephony?
ReplyDeleteMr. Gravenor must have the patience of a God to read thru it before adding it to increasing conical pile of written verbiage.
Anyway, AFAIR the ring back number 1191/41091 worked only on Step by Step equipment, Cross Bar, as in HUnter 2 of the era, was rung back by dialing ( pressing from a Touch Tone ) 57 plus the last five digits of the telephone numbers, as in 572-xxxx in HUnter 2.
One ring back that worked when I was last in Toronto the Whatever was to dial the telephone number of phone you were on. Flash switch hook, Dial 4, then hang up. Phone should ring.
Anyway, in the Bell in the later S by S era the ring back number was 41091, which was a DOUBLE Ring with a short gap between.
The first part of the ring the pulses were on the 'Ring' side of the line pair. The Dial Tone was always on the Ring side of the pair, Ring to Ground.
The second part of the Double-length ring the pulses were on the 'Tip' side of the line, Tip to Ground.
On a 2FR Two-Party line there were TWO Subscribers SHARING a single wire pair from the Exchange to two separate physicals locations in the field with TWO separate telephone numbers and listings in the Directory.
Saved the Bell one pair of wires, and allowed telephone service when Plant Facilities were getting tight.
A Party Line was cheaper.
Now, so that the correct telephone instrument would ring when it's number was dialed, the telephones associated on a party line were connected with their respective ringers from one side of the line to Ground for a Ring Party on one telephone number.
The other associated party line telephone was wired with it's ringer Tip to Ground for a Tip party.
So, when the equipment in the CO completed the call, it sent the ringing pulses down the line on the Ring side for a Ring party telephone, and sent the ring pulses down the Tip side line for a Tip party, both to ground.
If the opposite party lifted his receiver when the first party was talking, he would hear the conversation, and vice versa.
Sharing, courtesy and discretion played a part in successful Party Line uses. Just like driving a car in traffic. Hmmmm.
Could get REALLY stupid, as one can readily imagine, especially if some of the folks on a party line MIGHT be deemed layabouts whom MIGHT have seemingly survived on Dow in Quarts and cigarettes by the carton.
Anyway, most often the two drop wires for the two separate subscribers on a 2-party line were Associated at the same terminal and binding posts in the same terminal in the field, one drop going to the Ring party residence and the other going to the Tip party residence.
ReplyDeleteOther times the Association was at TWO separate terminals down the cable where the pair was represented.
Occasionally the association was done in the exchange, which really did not save a pair, tho'.
The Installer or Repairman had to be VERY careful when working on party lines to keep Ring and Tip parties correctly indentified and wired regarding 'polarity', especially when the drops were out of the same binding posts in the same terminal way aloft on a pole swaying the the wind at eleven at night, pouring rain or blowing snow at -10 F.
A line transfer involving party lines to clear another pair for a burglar, fire or water flow sprinkler alarm, lets say, could be very tricky.
For the latter, the Installer was given a list of terminals where that pair carrying the Supervisory circuit was represented and he was to visit each location and place red caps on the binding posts or red plastic rings around the pair in PIC cable.
If, due to a transfer, two Ring parties had to be associated, one of the residences would have to be visited to rewire their phones into a Tip party. Much fun when THAT subscriber had not even called for a Bell visit.
Could get really tacky if the Installer lost track, in the dark and blinding rain 40 feet in the air, foot arches screaming on the pole or ladder steps, of which way the polarity was on the drops and mixed them up reversed on the binding posts.
Then both parties' phones would ring on a Ring party's pulses, and neither would ring when a Tip party pulses came down the line, let say.
Certain telephone sets would not be compatible for Automatic Number Identification ANI when wired for Tip Party service, and the actual telephone set in the residence would have to be substituted for a more modern 500 set wired for a Tip.
The Bell was then still supplying a 302/352 style as standard, with the 500 series instruments held back unless directed by Service Order, or on a Tip party.
Subscribers receiving a 500 'for free' on a transfer would gab amongst themselves, and everyone would then want one and surround the pole next time they saw an Installer aloft and nag, just what one needed when surrounded by clothes lines, dead drops never removed and figuring how to route a new drop around those towering rear grey sheds in alleys in older parts of town.
Dogs could be a pest, also, but were often brighter than their owners.
ReplyDeleteSquirrels chewed the cables, and travelled tree-to-tree on them, the Bell applying sticky goop to thwart them
Anyway.
If an Installer wired two telephone sets, one for a Ring and the other for a Tip party, and installed them on the same pair and dialed 1191/41091 and hung up, at first the Ring party instrument would ring, a pause, then the Tip party instrument would ring on the longer double ring, both phones ringing one after the other.
Some parties, to ring their associated party dialed 41091, both parties' phones ringing, when ringing stopped, both parties picked up and talked.
There were other ways of dialing your Party.
( If you wanted to ring only the Ring party phone you dialed 4106-6, to ring only a Tip, you dialed 4106-7.
If an Installer thought a house MIGHT have a second unauthorized extension telephone connected, it COULD be measured from the Test Centre if ringer still across the line, after disconnecting the primary set, you dialed 41091 on your Lineman's Test Set, ( Black Rubber, 1011B, I still have one ) and the illegal set MIGHT ring if wired in, bells still connected and bell clapper not blocked.
Red faces and throat-clearings, but, not always. Could get stupid if the subscriber hated the Bell, had been drinking, been made to look bad for non-payment, lost a wad gambling, just got out of jail, again, etc.
Getting a telephone set 'back' when the Subscriber did not pay their bill was tense, too!!
They would go nuts when they saw and heard you climb the pole, the sound rattling all the clothesline pulleys, the vibration telegraphing to the house where the other pulley was, to cut off service. )
To test the coin relay in a pay telephone there was yet another number the Installer dialed to actuate the coin relay in Step by Step. I have forgotten it, 1198??
This was dialed as last four digits as in HU 6-1198 if 1198 was indeed the number.
The exchange would then send out the pulses to operate the coin relay in the pay phone and it would go Click-Clack, Click-Clack.
Now, you could dial this number from ANY telephone and the exchange would send out the coin relay pulses which were audible in the receiver.
If you dialed the exchange in Ste. Therese from HUnter on Monkland with the coin relay test number let say, the call passing thru several Step exchanges on the way, you heard a very satisfying array of clicks and clacks as relays in the thru exchanges clicked and clacked in succession down the line back from the far exchange. Lovely in the days of Step.
In rural areas they had multi-party lines where the actual telephone ringers had to be changed to accept the ringing pulses sent out.
In small grocery stores or other small businesses the owner COULD have a Non-Dial extension phone wired in to the pay telephone circuit to accept incoming calls only on the pay phone, as long as the second telephone was visible from the pay phone.
If he wanted to call out, he used the pay phone.
Back in the day, pay telephone numbers often started the last four digits with '00' as in TRenmore 0067.
If a business had more than one line and telephone number, the numbers would be shown in advertising on billboards as, let say, Elwood 1186-7-8, and the exchange would automatically cascade the calls to the next open number if the other numbers were busy.
Thank You.
Around 1966, a friend of a friend--who happened to work for Bell--told me about the trick one could use to fool the phone company that you hadn't hooked up another phone to the line in your home: simply open up the phone and disconnect the yellow wire (the one actually connected to the bell itself); that way, presumably when the test centre rang your house, the load would show that only one phone was connected even if an extra one was.
ReplyDeleteIt took many long years before the telcos in North America began to tolerate subscribers connecting extra phones in their homes when they were only paying their bill for one phone. I can see their point from the economic point-of-view, but it was virtually a victimless "crime", seldom emforced, and besides, if you had asked the installer to connect a four-pin socket in multiple rooms--so that you could unplug your single phone and move it from room to room, what was to stop that subscriber from purchasing extension phones from the numerous electronic and salvage-parts stores and hooking them up?
Telcos always said that they didn't like subscribers to hook up any old cheap phone that was not manufactured by Northern or Western Electric, giving the excuse that such third-party phone equipment might be unreliable and even defective--which was, in fact, often quite true.
Finally, around the 1970s, the telcos gave up nagging customers not to use "foreign" phones, so that today any old junk can be hooked up--and I do mean junk! Some grey-market Chinese phones you can buy in dollar and discount stores are so shoddy they shouldn't be allowed in the country, in my opinion.
I know that in 1970 BC Tel used Automatic Electric-type phones (the ones with the "snap-back" type rotary dials), yet when living in BC briefly I connected my Northern Electric phone and it worked fine.
Beginning with the 1962 telephone directory, subscribers' numbers began being listed as all-numerical: in other words, every directory up to 1961 would list your number as say: HU4-5678, but in 1962 it was printed as 484-5678. If you haven't already guessed, the reason for the switch was that the prefix names were rapidly being used up--mostly in the highly-populated U.S.--so that for newly-created exchanges such as with 954-5678, for example, there was no appropriate word or name available that could be substituted for that 95 prefix.
In the late 70s through the mid-80s, another phenomenon was brought to my attention: the "loop-line".
Perhaps it was some disgruntled telephone lineman who had been made to climb too many poles in sub-zero temperatures who spread the word that if you dialed say, 484-1194 and waited for a click, another person simulutaneously dialing 484-1195 would hook up with you, either deliberately or by accident.
Needless to say, such random connections generated much interest (boys meeting girls for blind dates, etc.), until the telcos got wind of this growing movement happening right under their noses so that they finally put an end to it; some of them even began charging a fee for this type of "dating service". CB radio operators would be speaking to strangers over the air and then be asked if they wanted to talk more securely over the loop-line. Alas, the loop-line is no more (as far as I know).
UrbanLegend said...
ReplyDelete"The address of the original Royal Bank on the southeast corner of Decarie and Queen Mary was 5294, but when it was decided to upgrade the premises, it was demolised around 1956, the new building shows up in Lovell's in 1957 addressed as 5292--the entrance moved slightly east. Too bad HQ had no idea that their new building was doomed to be demolished around 1964 for the "Depressway"; the next move being in the year 1965 to 5185 Queen Mary where the bank remains today."
I remember the 5292 bank very well. Our Iona School Gr. 4 class were invited to tour that bank branch in the 1950's. After touring the vault we were shown (and allowed to touch) a Canadian $1000 bill. Also, my dentist (Dr. Kruger) had an office above the bank. He was old-fashioned in his procedures. He never froze before drilling, and didn't do x-rays. He thought that both were unhealthy. He either filled, or pulled, based on a visual inspection.
I remember that earlier bank (#5294) had a pharmacy next to it. The pharmacy would attach a vertical row of ViewMasters on the inside of their window. Every week they would advance the reel in the ViewMaster, and I would press my forehead against the glass to view the various images, which to me were quite magical, being in 3-D. After viewing, my mother would take me to Peggy's for a 1/4 lb of cashews, or the Woolworth's for a malted milk, or a Lowney's Cherry Blossom.
I heard that Jean Coutu's first job as a pharmacist was in that particular drugstore, next to 5294 Queen Mary Rd.
Back in the Sixties there was this radio DJ at CFCF 600 named Dave Boxer and he liked to play games with the Bell.
ReplyDeleteWhen on the Air, he would say to all the pimple-popping teens listening in and say 'Lets play Dial A Boxer Buddy!! and then give out the telephone number for CFCF on the air.
On the count of three about 10 thousand teens would grab their telephones and Dial CFCF.
The Exchanges went nuts in Step by Step and hundreds of calls got mis-directed as the switches jammed, two crossing at once EVERYWHERE and then there would be a stranger on your line also trying to get thru.
Word went around inside the Bell that the exchanges all over the area would suddenly go nuts all at once, the big Gong would start chiming and the coloured trouble lights at each end of the equipment racks would all light up at once.
From 50 calls a minute to thousands on a quiet evening at a big exchange like CRescent.
Often several times an evening.
Amps would rise, and the CO men would run around like squirrels amongst the racks clearing faults.
Finally someone figured that all the calls were trying to get thru to CFCF and some Bell employees played an AM radio in a few of the exchanges when Boxer did it again on the Air.
The exchanges went nuts on the count of three.
Finally high-level Bell management witness the exchanges seizing up first hand, blocking many other important calls and tying up the City and area.
Heavy pressure was brought to bear on CFCF to have Boxer cut it out, or Bell would deny CFCF service.
It went away, but Boxer laughed for weeks after.
Thank You.
I'm not sure what the current ringback number is, but I know that as of 2010, the ANAC was 959-1164. It may still be, but I hear they change it occasionally. Anyone know?
ReplyDeleteThere are several 958- and 959- numbers, some are backdoors to 911 so don't fart around too much with them.
When 98 CKGM was in its top-40 heydey, they ran contests that almost crashed the phone system. I recall my late aunt wanting to call in to a contest in 1971-72. She was at a payphone, put a dime in, got a very crackly dial tone, began calling 790-0444 ('GM's number at the time) then found herself connected to three other people also trying to get through. She would have been calling from the territory of the REgent exchange at the time. Pretty crazy.
The 790- prefix is served out of the LAfontaine exchange on Papineau.
I love all these stories.
I own a NE model 302, a few 500's, a 2500, an early (hard-wired) Contempra, and an NE butt set. They all work beautifully. The one that I have in active service now is a shiny black NE 500. Oh that ring!
Chuckling old Dave Boxer notwithstanding, he didn't hold a candle to CKGM 980's Pat Burns (the call-in host of "The Hotline", not the Canadiens former coach).
ReplyDeleteBurns showed up in Montreal in 1965 after having already made a name for himself on Vancouver's CJOR as a controversial talk-show host there for many years (in the Joe Pyne tradition) and quickly became the bane of Quebec separatists whom Burns routinely attacked and lambasted over the air.
Anyway, Burns was very popular, especially with women listeners who loved his deep and sultry voice-delivery. Nevertheless, he irked some people so it wasn't long before one or more of them began trying tie up Burn's phone lines by simply dialing the first 6-digits of CKGM's call in number, but not dialing the seventh number, which often succeeded in preventing any further calls from getting through to Burns, thus leaving a lot of air time filled with the "beep beep" of the busy tone.
Eventually, I suppose Bell figured out a way to untangle the mess so that particular trick wasn't as effective anymore.
One thing, though: I wish we had more real fighters like Burns back on the air. Today's call-in hosts are basically milketoast wimps with plenty of hip knowledge but little guts when it comes to taking a stand.
In the Bell, the unofficial word was that 'The Subscriber' was ALWAYS RIGHT!
ReplyDeleteThe Union man out in the field did not always agree, as he alone dealt with 'The Subscriber' in all his/her glory.
One rainy cold afternoon I went on a Service Order to install a second line and telephone at a residence in the Queen Mary-Cote de Neiges area near the Wax Museum on the REgent exchange.
The house on the order, account the slope of the Mountain was quite a bit higher than the house behind on the next street over, the pole and terminal serving both houses in the rear, no alley.
The pole was stepped, Lead Cable NF 16 Terminal.
First move was to install a drop wire from the house to the pole and terminal.
Bonus! There had been a second line in the house before, and a drop was already up!! saving much work as the rain pelted down.
I put on my Body Belt and went up the pole to the terminal.
Now a problem appeared.
Just above the NF 16 Terminal, whose cover slid up to expose the Binding Posts inside was a clothesline and pulley on a hook screwed into the pole itself, prohibiting the terminal cover from being raised.
The terminal was situated so I faced the house on the service order, the clothesline passing above my head to the house behind on the next street a half lot over as the pole was not directly behind that house.
A long clothesline!!!
The rain pelted down.
So, I had to loosen the line, which was tight, unhook the pulley and line and rehook it on a pole step, and back out the hook with Lineman's Pliers.
First I had to get slack in the rope, so I pulled the clothesline along, as the slack adjuster was at the house end, per usual.
AS SOON AS I moved the rope, the pulley screeched as needed oil.
A nanosecond later the back door of the house the line went to slammed opened and this shrill voice told me in no uncertain terms to Leave Her Line ALONE!!
I said I had to move it to open the terminal and would put it back when done.
I did not bother to inform her that the Bell did not permit unauthorized attachments to their poles, etc., as it would be a waste of my time.
I got some slack in the rope, unhooked 'her' pulley and hooked onto a pole step.
She started to Scream! Her husband knew Alexander Graham Bell, and Watson, TOO! I would lose my job. Mayor Drapeau was over for dinner the night before, they owned Fifty-Thousand Bell Shares and so on.
She started to grab and shake the clothesline at HER end, this sending waves back and forth in the rope.
I was scared the pulley at my end would jump off the step and go flying into the next yard in a tangle of rope.
The yelling and noise brought out the neighbours and everyone was getting a free show!
The rain pelted down.
Definite contender for the Four-Letter-Word-for-a-Female-Orifice-of-the-Year award.
The rain pelted down and finally chased her in.
I tested the pair and connected the drop to the house, all the time thinking.
A LIGHT CAME ON in my head. Click!
I looked over my shoulder and could see her beaky nose parting the drapes in the window.
I took the hook, which was LONG and required 12 or 14 turns to remove, and screwed it in about an inch and a half, then 'faking' the rest of the turns as my body hid the hook from her house, and put the pulley and clothesline back on, and climbed down.
So, sometime later, under a full load of wet sheets and unmentionables on a windy day the hook would come out and all the laundry would fall to the ground in the neighbours yard.
Wish I was there.
Thank You.
Colin Paterson: Well, then you’re a much older fart than me, because when you lived in the 5480 Queen-Mary appartment building, I was playing in the huge backyard behind 5482...
ReplyDeleteI used to look at the huge 6-7 story appartment building in the back, and thought "it must be great to live in such a building"… (40 years later when I "finally" did, I actually liked it).
See the Gazette, July 17, 1959, page 1 which shows a map of the proposed Decarie Expressway.
ReplyDeleteA related article at the bottom of the same page gives some interesting details, many of which never materialized.
Anyone remember a small shop on Decarie corner of Van Horne called Garland's? In 1960s I was a little kid my mom took me shopping there. I also remember Woolworth and Steinberg's someone mentioned.
ReplyDeleteLovell's Directory for 1961 lists Garland Meat Market at 6210 Decarie and Garland Stationery & Coffee Shop at 6190, all on the northwest corner at Van Horne.
ReplyDeleteI remember Chubby's Restaurant was at 6190 Decarie during the late 1950s although I never ate there myself.
To summarize, it was perhaps the wiser choice to build the de Namur Metro where it is exists rather than at Victoria and Jean Talon, although as of the date of this posting (Dec. 24, 2017) the Triangle complex of condos, commercial outlets, and green space at the latter-mentioned intersection has still yet to be completed due to an ongoing property-line dispute. A more frequent scheduling of bus route 92 along Jean Talon would help matters.
ReplyDeleteSee this 1947 aerial map grid of where Jean Talon West (previously named de Namur) terminated and swerved north into de la Savane.
http://archivesdemontreal.com/greffe/vues-aeriennes-archives/jpeg/VM97-3_7P16-22.jpg
Left-click toggle the map for a full-sized view and you will see a clearer picture of a creek running west of and parallel to de la Savane. From de la Savane this creek would wind its way north eventually to link up with Raimbault Creek about which there are a few websites.
Decades earlier, this tributary zig-zagged its way alongside where Cote des Neiges Road would later be built, its source being a small lake approximately at its southwest intersection with Queen Mary Road.
The creek alongside Cote des Neiges eventually became so polluted that it was placed into pipes as was the remainder of Raimbault Creek itself in the late 1960s. It ran mostly through Ville St. Laurent ultimately to empty from Raimbault Park into the Riviere des Prairies. Its path can easily be followed in the 1947 collection of map grids.
Does anyone remember the name of a clothing store, on queen mary just west of decaarie selling mostly pants?
ReplyDeleteBacktracking through this thread, for the benefit of telephone historians, as of March 29, 1952 Montreal payphones required 10 cents to place a local call. For 60 years up until then a local call was only 5 cents.
ReplyDeleteSee the rate change announcement in the Montreal Gazette of March 28, 1952 page 17 "Payphones Demand 10c Tomorrow".
Other Canadian cities were likewise affected as it had in the U.S. during the previous months.