Pastime: Calling “Castle 6″…

Recently when all the cyber talk on various Warren Facebook pages was humming about Wayne’s Confectionary, someone out of the blue, recited the phone number for Wayne’s.

The questioner, I presume, got it correct. That number, sadly, has been reassigned since Wayne’s is no longer in business.

But I knew, when the person who posted it said it, that phone number wasn’t 226-whatever.

To kids of my generation it was “Castle 6.”

That’s how the generation(s) that grew up in the 1950’s-80 knew their telephone numbers.

At least for those of us in Warren.

That moniker of “Castle 6” was the exchange alphanumeric code for Warren’s link on the Southwestern Bell Telephone Exchange. And in the day, you only had to dial 6 and then the remaining 4 digits to get a call through on the land-line telephone number.

The round metal dials with the finger holes (predating push button phones) spun around and around clicking loudly on most of the city’s plain black telephones from the Western Electric Telephone Company.

There was no “call waiting,” you heard only the buzz, buzz, buzz of a “busy signal.”

Some of the printed advertisements in the Eagle Democrat of those days simply said: Call Castle 6 and then the telephone number.

The Eagle’s phone number, for example: was CA6-5831.

The Mayor’s office was CA6-6743 and the Chamber of Commerce was CA6-5225.

Dialing up one of the oldest businesses in Bradley County, call Gannaway Drug at CA6-3751, or how about Frazer Funeral Home at CA6-2621.

Well, hopefully if you are under, 50 years you get it.

Hermitage and Banks telephone exchanges were once operated out of the Ingalls Telephone Company, which later was absorbed into the Hampton Telephone Company operated by E.M. Bailey, owner and president, in the mid-1960s. That rural company, today, no longer exists.

Other area SW Bell phone exchanges that come to mind from yesteryear were:

Any phone call to McGehee was to Canal2, or 222. 

Monticello’s exchange was EMprire5, or 365.

Pine Bluff’s exchange was Jefferson5, 535.

And there were several exchanges in Little Rock. For example, if you called someone in the Heights area of Little Rock it was Mohawk5.

Central Little Rock, especially the downtown business district, was Franklin4.

Dialing over the Arkansas River to North Little Rock, the exchange name was Skyline5.

Calling up to the flagship UofA camps in Fayetteville resulted in you asking the operator to dial up Hillcrest2.

I do not recall when Southwestern Bell had “live” operators on site in the city of Warren. 

Actually, there was a local crew of about four or five servicemen who lived in Warren when I was a kid. Among them was Dale Lovett. He and his wife Betty, who worked at the Warren Bank & Trust for decades, had two daughters, Connie and Ginger. Both were classmates at WHS in the 1970s.  

The modern-day SW Bell Telephone office was just a block east off the Square.

It was also the site of the legendary “Topper” , one of the most notorious of the Warren saloons. The “Topper” was a going business, until a post WWII wet/dry vote ran the Demon Rum and his pal John Barleycorn out of Warren and Bradley County’s drinking establishments and liquor stores.

The “Topper,” as we all knew, had an ape (actually a large and older chimpanzee) chained to a tree in the Topper yard. The ape was sort of a local oddity.

Pre-dating me for sure, but many cigarettes and cigars were smoked by that poor creature, I am told. And every once in a while, those who bent their elbows at the bar provided that poor monkey with a frosted alcoholic beverage, and witnesses to these drunken events said the ape would certainly put on a show walking a rope strung between the trees on the lot.

What happened to the ape? I’ve never heard that tale.

The “Topper”, unable to sell beer, went out of business.

Several other businesses were in the building, until SW Bell bulldozed it down and put up a telephone satellite office.

McGehee for many years into the late 1970s housed the area’s live telephone operators and business office for Southeast Arkansas – until all such operations were finally moved, sadly to Little Rock.

The ape and the Topper have little to do with “Castle 6” and Warren.

But somehow it is all just a Pastime we all can remember.