Local phone prefixes

Jake has a post of local (to Bend) telephone prefixes. Good resource. And he says, "When I lived in Bend growing up, I knew if the phone number didn’t start with 38-something (382, 385, 388, 389, and then 383 came along later) or 593, it was a long-distance call." I remember, too, when it was just 382, 388 and 389; people would regularly write phone numbers with only the third digit of the prefix (e.g., 9-0123).

Of course, only having to dial four digits is a little before my time; even though the "38" part was assumed, you still had to dial the full seven digits. And yes, calling Redmond (which was only 548, and later, 923), was long distance.

One comment

  1. Yeah, if I remember correctly, the school district and hospital had something to do with the 383 and 385 prefix creation, as they wanted to get their own prefix for their operations so that people could directly call extensions. Numbers have long since been moved out, but it used to be the bulk majority of the 383 and 385 numbers belonged to either the schools or SCMC.

Comments are closed.