Code Areas

Busy, busy, busy. This is good, on the whole, since my creditors expect legal tender of one kind or another. And I want to take a couple of weeks off in the summer, like people do sometimes.

But there’s time for short notes even yet, and TV too. Since the advent of Netflix, I watch old TV when I can. Last week I mentioned Petticoat Junction as an example. I must not be the only one, as these things are on DVD (but I’d like to see even more obscure shows – one-season flops – on disk, too). Why so much old TV? Mere nostalgia?

Maybe. But I’m also fascinated by details that would not appear in more recent shows. One of the PJ episodes involves the visit of the president of the railroad that technically owns the Hooterville Cannonball, and at great effort he finds a telephone and places an operator assisted, long-distance call. Operator assistance isn’t the detail that’s so peculiar, since you can still do that (I think), though it’s rare and expensive. But while relaying the phone number to the operator, he said “code area,” followed by three numbers and then the phone-number digits.

In fact he said it at least three times, since getting through the Hooterville operator involved comic repetition. I know that area codes were a postwar development and took some time to be fully implemented, but they would have been established by 1963. I wonder, however, if the term was in flux, “area code” winning out later, or this was a nonce usage by the writers. No time to look it up, even if such information exists. But I like to wonder about it.