I grew up in the Seattle area in the mid-1950s and 1960s. One of the exchanges in Seattle was MUtual, starting with MU just like NYC's Murray Hill. One year Sha

I grew up in the Seattle area in the mid-1950s and 1960s. One of the exchanges in Seattle was MUtual, starting with MU just like NYC's Murray Hill. One year Shari Lewis, the puppeteer famous for creating the Lamb Chop and Charley Horse characters, came to Seattle to host a telethon, probably for what is now Children's Hospital. She kept forgetting that MU was the prefix for Mutual and told us to dial Murray Hill instead, before catching and correcting herself almost every time. When they started using numeric dialing, they simply substituted two digits for the letters. My exchange was VErnon, so the two digits became 83. It was confusing for long time as I lived over the county line from Tacoma, which also had the same prefix but was long distance and remained so until cell phones pretty much erased the local long distance regime.