Old neighborhood exchange lives on

BALTIMORE (Map, News) - This is the story of my grandparents’ telephone number — Eastern 7-5254 — the only one they ever had; the one assigned to them by the Chesapeake & Potomac Telephone Co. before numbers replaced neighborhood exchanges. Long before you had to use an area code to make a local call.

The number, known as 410-327-5254 after I inherited the house that went with it, is long dead in Baltimore. But it lives on — improbably, magically — in Los Angeles.

After the Second World War, the Southeast Baltimore neighborhood near City Hospitals called “The Hill” — now Greektown — was home to many Italian families.

There, a woman named “Miss Genna-Rose” was the neighborhood Ma Bell. She lived next door to my grandparents, who visited friends in person and wrote letters to family back in Spain, uncomplicated people with no apparent need of a phone.

“When I was dating your father in 1951, I had to call over to Miss Genarose whenever I wanted to reach him,” said my mother, who’d be calling from her parents’ house in Canton on Dickens 2-3793.

“Miss Genarose say, in her thick Italian accent, ‘Wait-a mi-noot!’ ”

And then she would bellow over the wire fence to tell my grandparents that there was a call for my father, Ralph, who’d go next door to say whatever a teenage boy had to say to a teenage girl under the eye of a wise hen stirring a pot of tomato sauce with a wooden spoon.

To this day, when someone in my family needs a moment to find something or a little extra time getting out of the house, they invoke the hollering ghost of “Genna-Rose” and say, “Wait-a mi-noot!”

My mother's family, the Jones clan, had a phone as early as 1948 — about the same time better-off families were getting televisions — because my godmother, Aunt Sylvia, was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Along with thousands of other Marylanders, Sylvia was treated for TB at Mount Wilson State Hospital and Sanitarium — telephone Hunter 6-7676, closed in 1981 — in northwest Baltimore County.

My maternal grandfather, Willie Jones, arranged for a phone to be put in when the family was waiting on a Mount Wilson bed for Sylvia. He handled the problem where he conducted most of his business, the neighborhood gin mill. In later years, his favorite joint was Aggie Silks — I remember playing shuffleboard with him as a kid and eating Wise potato chips — but in the late 1940s he frequented a joint called Duffy’s around Lakewood Avenue and Hudson Street.

Willie put in for a phone with a local pol, most likely old man Duffy himself.

“It went right across the street from the phone pole on the corner and hooked us up to three other houses, a real party line,” remembers Mom, who used to run tin cans connected by string between a rear window in her house at 2729 Dillon St. and her cousin Beverly’s bedroom next door. The girls believed their voices were carried along the twine, but if you really wanted to call out of 2727 Dillon St., you used Eastern 7-4874.

It wasn’t until my father joined the Coast Guard during the Korean War that the Alvarez family no longer had to depend on Miss Genarose for technology patented in 1876.

The phone installed at 627 South Macon St. was heavy and black, the kind with a metal receiver substantial enough to bludgeon a dirty double-crosser in a dime store crime novel. It was screwed to the wall in the first-floor kitchen, just below the Art Deco, pastel blue electric clock. The cord was so short you had to stand next to the phone to talk.

When I moved in with my grandfather in 1989, it was still on the wall. After he died, I replaced it with a touch-tone. Because we had the same name, I didn’t even have to change the listing.

When I started writing in Hollywood in 2005, my agent forced me to get a cell phone. The Macon Street number languished, nothing going out and nothing coming in. Just before I had it disconnected, I signed up for a discount card at a Los Angeles supermarket named, of all things, Ralph’s. When it asked me for a password, I gave it 410.327.5254.

Somewhere in the universe, every time the cashier punches in that number to save me 11 cents on a box of Pop-Tarts, that magic number rings.

Rafael Alvarez is an author and screenwriter based in Baltimore and Los Angeles. His books — fiction, journalism and essays — include “The Fountain of Highlandtown” and “Storyteller.” He can be reached at ralvarez@baltimoreexaminer.com.

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