RIVER CITY JOURNAL: CENTRAL? GIVE ME EDDIE'S HOUSE, PLEASE

And you know what? The operator at the other end of the line knew your voice and, therefore, knew who Eddie was and what number to connect you with. Pretty smart. A lot smarter than a cellular phone whose memory vanishes every time the battery runs down.

Once upon a time, telephone numbers were a combination of letters and numbers in places where there were enough telephones to warrant seven-digit numbers.

You remember, for example, numbers in the Kansas City area in the 1960s like PL7-2302 and GL4-4003. The "PL" and the "GL" stood for "Plaza" and "Gladstone." They were not only telephone exchanges, they were geographic identification. If you were looking for the number of a business that was convenient, the exchanges helped.

Then came the day that the phone company announced it was dropping the lettered telephone exchanges in favor of all-numeral phone numbers. You wondered how in the world people could remember all those numbers.

What goes around comes around. For the past few years the fad has been telephone numbers with lots of letters in them that spell out something. Most phone users are so accustomed to all numbers that it is hard to find the "H" in a hurry. All of which proves that humans are habitual creatures and can be trained to do most repetitive tasks without thinking.

In smaller communities of yesterday, of course, two or three numbers were sufficient for most folks' telephones. In fact, you didn't need numbers at all in small towns back then. You just called "Central" and asked to be connected to your friend or the store or the doctor's office or whatever.

Many farm families didn't have telephones. In the Ozarks west of here, electricity came in the early 1950s, and telephone lines didn't come until more than a decade later.

Since your family didn't have a phone, using the telephone was reserved for family crises and other emergencies. This meant going to the telephone office in town where one of the switchboard operators would dial long distance for you. Then you would go out on the sidewalk to the pay phone to carry on a conversation for all the passers-by to hear. Later, the phone company upgraded to an indoor telephone for walk-in customers.

Phones and toilets, it seems, have a lot in common.

For all those years since your folks got their first telephone, you have lived in other parts of the country. The area code became a fixture, because every time you dialed home you had to dial 314.

Even then, calling long distance was reserved for special occasions like holidays or birthdays, or major events like births and deaths, or for calamities like automobile accidents and major surgery.

Nowadays people call each other at the drop of a hat from just about every place imaginable. Car phones and portable phones are everywhere. Walking through the mall the other day you passed a shopper talking on a cellular phone. Several stores away there was another shopper on the phone. Were they talking to each other? Comparing prices? Gossiping?

Some hotels offer phones in the bathroom as a sign of upscale elegance, although it is beyond any stretch of your feeble imagination to understand why anyone would want to talk on the phone while performing certain bodily functions.

The modern world has become hopelessly addicted to telephones. Where you live there are six telephones (none in bathrooms), including two -- that's right, two -- in the kitchen. Although you have never talked to your wife on the phone while both of you were in the kitchen, you have tried to fathom the intercom system to call from the kitchen to the family room. So far the technology has been too complicated to figure out. Too many buttons to push and too many numbers to remember.

Now the phone company wants you to remember a new area code. The familiar 314 has been reserved for the St. Louis area. Elsewhere folks are asked to use 573. A few years from now you will wonder why there was so much fuss about the change.

Suffice to say that ZIP Codes and PINs and voice-mail access numbers and e-mail codes and Internet addresses aren't making things any easier.

For each day you grow a little older and a little grayer, you understand more and more why old fogies are the way they are.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.