Friend of this blog, Doug Virden, sent in some interesting phone information:
"This
past month the radio stations currently located at 2400 Cottondale Lane
have dropped their 433 prefix studio numbers. I will go into the
reason for that and the reason for the establishment of the prefix for
radio stations in Little Rock.
Thanks to having some old phone books I was able to gather information on the studio phone numbers for KAAY.
When KAAY premiered in September 1962 the studio and main office shared one phone number which was FRanklin5-5311.
Sometime
after moving to 7th Street the name prefixes were dropped by the phone
company and the 7th Street number became 375-0105. The offices kept the
375-5311 number. When KAAY moved to 2400 Cottondale
in the fall of 1976 the studio number was 661-1212. Within about a
year or two KAAY's studio number became 433-0059. According to someone
who currently works in the Cottondale building KAAY may have been the
reason the 433 prefix was established for radio stations in Little
Rock. The prefix was set up to be able to handle a large amount of
calls without blowing up phone circuits all over town. These were also
known as choke lines.
The reason the radio stations
currently in the Cottondale building discontinued their 433 numbers is
because those particular phone lines won't transfer to the digital
system and if the lines went down there is really not anyone from the
phone company that knows how to work on those lines anymore since all
those workers have pretty much retired."
Yes, folks who actually know analog technology are few and far between now. In fact, in our area of Alabama, the phone company is quietly encouraging people to drop their terrestrial phone lines in lieu of all cell phone coverage. I personally know (being in the emergency power generations field) that cell sites can go down because of power and emergency back-up generator failure. Those cell phones are only portable radios that are linked to physical phone lines somewhere, just not at your domicile. You're friendly, neighborhood phone technicians are slowly retiring and all you get is someone in India who can't speak in English wanting to tell you that your cell phone is at fault.
Enough of that. Speaking of call-in lines to radio stations, my wife used to be the Chief Operator at a local hospital and had a bank of lines available to her; when a local station had a contest going on, she could start calling and put them on hold, then come back and answer them. When she was the "nth" caller, she won! I know, that was "loading the bases", but she was so successful, she won a lot of loot...and had to pick it up in different family's names, like her sisters and her mother's names. In fact, one of the biggies was WABB (now defunct, so I guess the statute of limitations is over!), which was where Wayne Moss worked for a bit. I'll have to look back at the timeline and see when she was calling the station, but I think Wayne was long gone before then. And another tning- the hospital was only two city blocks away from WABB!
Thanks, Doug! Keep the interesting stuff coming!
Bud S. (staceys4@hotmail.com)
