On June 19, 1960, the Santa Clarita Valley took a step into the future of communication as the Newhall telephone exchange officially transitioned from manual operator to direct dial telephone service.

The upgrade, announced by Pacific Telephone manager Ray Jenner, marked the arrival of a “three-in-one communications package” never before offered in Southern California. 

With the flip of a switch, local phone users received direct-dial telephone service, Direct Distance Dialing (DDD) and All Number Calling, without an increase in rates. 

The change ended decades of operator-assisted calling in the Santa Clarita Valley. 

Located at 24705 Newhall Avenue, Pacific Telephone’s new multi-million dollar switching center was equipped with cutting-edge technology of the time – an automated system that used more than 1800 electromagnetic switches, 70,000 relays and nearly 29 million feet of wire to connect local and long-distance calls faster and more reliably than ever before. 

The switch also introduced DDD, allowing newhall residents to dial directly to more than 50 million phones across the U.S. and Canada, including Los Angeles numbers in the 213 area code, all without an operator to connect them. 

The ranching town of Newhall was one of the first Southern California communities to adopt All Number Calling, phasing out lettered prefixes like “WI-4” in favor of seven-digit numbers beginning with the new “259” exchange.

The change was part of a nationwide plan to accommodate the explosive growth of telephone users and avoid running out of usable number combinations, a crisis that engineers at the time estimated would otherwise have occurred as early as 1975.

June 19, 1960, represented a coming-of-age moment for the fast-growing community of Newhall. Whole residents may have one told the local operator whom they wanted to reach, by late summer of that year, Newhall callers were instead punching in seven-digit numbers themselves. 

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