I mostly stay focused at this site on payphones and closely related matters, but for the most part I consider anything to do with telephones fair game. In that spirit, last week I spotted something interesting in the opening credits of Saturday Night Live, Season 5, which aired in 1979. The opening bit, in which the guest host and stars of the show are announced, is accompanied by a number of New York City street scenes. In the screengrab below you will see, at the top left, a pattern that looks like an old telephone exchange name phone number: OO-6-3161.

The questions arise. If that is a phone number then what did “OO” stand for? Typically a telephone exchange name phone number started with the first two letters of an ordinary, pronouncable word, like the EVergreen exchange in Greenpoint, or ORegon in Manhattan, though exceptions existed (more on that in a moment). I don’t know what ordinary word starts with “OO” but the possibilities are kind of funny. OOmpaloompa? “OOperator, give me OOdles-6-5000.”

A friend suggested the “OO” comes from “BrOOklyn”. I’ve never seen an exchange name that used letters from the middle of a word, and while it at least seems plausible I find no evidence that anything like a “BrOOklyn” exchange existed.

No reference to “OO” appears at the Telephone EXchange Name Project, nor at the Wayback Machine’s archived copy of the former New York City Telephone Exchanges website. Searches against newspapers archives and other research databases turned up nothing. The closest connection came from someone saying she remembered an “Old Orchard” exchange in Skokie, Illinois. That would be out of pattern for the exchange name format but regardless, one would not expect to find a Skokie exchange in use in New York.

Telephone exchange names were phased out of use in the 1960s but vestiges of their past usage linger to this day if you know what to look for. I see them once in a while, filing them under my series of Telephone Exchange Name Sightings. Most recently I spotted what was either a MIchigan or MInnesota exchange on a fence in Corona, Queens.

A common assumption about exchange name numbers was that they all reflected pronouncable words or phrases, but that’s just not true. In the movie Taxi Driver I spotted a KH-1 number. I posted this to my website, questioning whether KH had ever been a real exchange. Eventually I heard from someone who had evidence and solid memory of calling a KH number. He sent me a calling card for the United Taxi Owners Guild, which has a KH-1 number printed on it.

Other evidence of non-pronouncable exchange names is found in the discussion at the Telephone EXchange Name Project.

But the “OO” exchange in NYC remains, for now at least, a bit of a mystery. Maybe “OO-6-3161” is not a phone number after all? But what else would it be? Or maybe it’s not “OO” but ∞, the infinity symbol. “OOperator, give me INfinity 6-3161.”

UPDATE, 3/19/2020
I posted about this to Twitter, where Christopher Agocs suggested that the number, when dialed, was 666-3161, and that maybe invoking the number of the beast in this coded form amounted to some kind of very subtle joke by SNL’s graphic designers. It’s subtle enough that, if true, makes me think this strange-looking phone number was some kind of inside joke among the SNL staff. Maybe 666-3161 was Lorne Michael’s phone number, or something like that?

Assuming it is doctored I would think SNL might have done so for the sake of not broadcasting the actual phone number of that Nathan’s hot dog location, and in so doing made a little joke from it.