David Lazarus describes the Time Lady’s end in California.
“It was always there,” said Orlo Brown, 70, who for many years kept Pacific Bell’s (and subsequently SBC’s) time machines running in a downtown Los Angeles office building. “Everybody knew the number.”
Richard Frenkiel was assigned to work on the time machines when he joined Bell Labs in the early 1960s. He described the devices as large drums about 2 feet in diameter, with as many as 100 album-like audio tracks on the exterior. Whenever someone called time, the drums would start turning and a message would begin, with different tracks mixed together on the fly. (LA Times)
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I also remember a Carol Burnett skit showing a woman in a recording booth talking about levels and reverb with a sound engineer, and then when the director cues her, she goes into reciting the time. It was a good bit, but in later years I thought how that voice artist probably did, in fact, take her job just as seriously as Carol Burnett took hers.
Do you remember how we called 844-2525 repeatedly on New Year’s eve to hear “EXACTLY” when the new year started? Or how about calling 936-1212 for the weather on a winter school night when snow was in the forecast and we were hoping for a snow day the next morning? Remember when we found out that you could press any 4 numbers after 844 or 936 and still get the time or weather?