The Southern Ontario/WNY Radio-TV Forum / An Odd Radio-Related Family Discovery

**Posted by RadioActive** December 13, 2024 11:54 am

This will be completely irrelevant to most, but I simply don't know what to make of it.

My wonderful dad passed away in 2006 at the age of 86 and I still miss him. I just found an old metal box in the basement I'd long forgotten about that contained an ancient soldering iron he once had. (He was very handy while his son, yours truly, is all thumbs with tools.)

Inside the box it was stored in, I found a post-it note in his handwriting. There was several things he'd put on it and one them was a phone number - 870-6400. It took me a second after looking at this thing to realize it sounded familiar. And then it came to me - it's the call-in number for AM640, although I have no idea what date it was written or whether that was their number at the time.

Was my father a caller to one of their shows? Did he even listen to the station? Why did he write it down? A mystery I will never be able to solve but what a weird coincidence decades in the making. It is indeeed a small world.

Now back to more important posts...

**Posted by mace** December 13, 2024 12:10 pm

I don't know how you lookup the history of telephone numbers, but the AM640 phone number was probably previously assigned to another business or private residence.

**Posted by RadioActive** December 13, 2024 12:29 pm

mace wrote:
I don't know how you lookup the history of telephone numbers, but the AM640 phone number was probably previously assigned to another business or private residence.

Could be, but if so, what a weird coincidence.

**Posted by ig** December 13, 2024 12:37 pm

mace wrote:
I don't know how you lookup the history of telephone numbers, but the AM640 phone number was probably previously assigned to another business or private residence.

Doubt it. 416-870 is (was?) a Bell Choke exchange. Designed to deal with massive incoming calls, for contests, radio promotions etc. Otherwise it could knock out the entire exchange. Since most stations were downtown, 92* / 86* / 36* it would have been bad

870-6400 was always the number for 640.

ig.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choke_exchange#:~:text=A%20choke%20exchange%20is%20a,stations%20and%20event%20ticket%20vendors.

**Posted by RadioActive** December 13, 2024 12:43 pm

I think I may have solved this. While there's a lot written on that post-it, underneath the phone number I could make out what he wrote - "Free Will Review."

I'm not 100% sure but didn't 640 once run an informercial for a firm (it might have been Fish & Associates) that offered free will reviews?

Perhaps he had a question and wanted to call in to the show. That might explain it.

**Posted by Davenet** December 13, 2024 2:28 pm

ig wrote:
Doubt it. 416-870 is (was?) a Bell Choke exchange. Designed to deal with massive incoming calls, for contests, radio promotions etc. Otherwise it could knock out the entire exchange.

Reminds me of when I was involved with the startup of Flow 93.5 back in 2001. The powers-that-be there chose a small third-party provider to handle all of the station's phone needs. That included 4 lines for on-air use. Bell's Choke exchange services were NOT used, presumably because of the expense.

On our first call-in show we announced the number to call and, within a couple of minutes, completely crashed the provider's systems! We got no calls at all for the rest of the hour.

**Posted by ig** December 13, 2024 3:38 pm

Free will review was Les Kotzer at Fish.
Good memory

RadioActive wrote:
I think I may have solved this. While there's a lot written on that post-it, underneath the phone number I could make out what he wrote - "Free Will Review."

I'm not 100% sure but didn't 640 once run an informercial for a firm (it might have been Fish & Associates) that offered free will reviews?

Perhaps he had a question and wanted to call in to the show. That might explain it.

**Posted by ig** December 13, 2024 3:41 pm

A million years ago at 'RB, as cell phones were becoming more and more popular the annual Sick Kids Radiothon was coming up, and Sick Kids foundation wanted to take phone donations from cell phones as well as POTS.

They were thrilled they had managed to get an MDC number, but the * prefix was getting tight.

They settled on

#KIDS Toll Free, anywhere in Canada.

Say it out loud.

Till we mentioned it in a meeting, nobody there had.

We never ended up using it. Surprise

I always thought #SAND would be a fun talk show number for those who disagreed and a direct line to the far more interesting callers

ig.

Davenet wrote:
ig wrote:
Doubt it. 416-870 is (was?) a Bell Choke exchange. Designed to deal with massive incoming calls, for contests, radio promotions etc. Otherwise it could knock out the entire exchange.
Reminds me of when I was involved with the startup of Flow 93.5 back in 2001. The powers-that-be there chose a small third-party provider to handle all of the station's phone needs. That included 4 lines for on-air use. Bell's Choke exchange services were NOT used, presumably because of the expense.

On our first call-in show we announced the number to call and, within a couple of minutes, completely crashed the provider's systems! We got no calls at all for the rest of the hour.

**Posted by ig** December 13, 2024 3:48 pm

That's an interesting thought. I believe the 87* exchange was a toll free service Bell offered. I don't _think_ there were extra fees because they were the ones who benefited from it. The station still had to pay for a bunch of DID lines and the 87* calls are forwarded to those centrex hunt groups.

Davenet wrote:
ig wrote:
Doubt it. 416-870 is (was?) a Bell Choke exchange. Designed to deal with massive incoming calls, for contests, radio promotions etc. Otherwise it could knock out the entire exchange.
Reminds me of when I was involved with the startup of Flow 93.5 back in 2001. The powers-that-be there chose a small third-party provider to handle all of the station's phone needs. That included 4 lines for on-air use. Bell's Choke exchange services were NOT used, presumably because of the expense.

On our first call-in show we announced the number to call and, within a couple of minutes, completely crashed the provider's systems! We got no calls at all for the rest of the hour.

**Posted by MJ Vancouver** December 13, 2024 9:22 pm

ig wrote:
mace wrote:
I don't know how you lookup the history of telephone numbers, but the AM640 phone number was probably previously assigned to another business or private residence.
Doubt it. 416-870 is (was?) a Bell Choke exchange. Designed to deal with massive incoming calls, for contests, radio promotions etc. Otherwise it could knock out the entire exchange. Since most stations were downtown, 92* / 86* / 36* it would have been bad

870-6400 was always the number for 640.

ig.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choke_exchange#:~:text=A%20choke%20exchange%20is%20a,stations%20and%20event%20ticket%20vendors.

I still remember 870-7716 being the number for the CityPulse NewsTest.

London had 519-643 as its choke exchange. CJBK always used 643-1290 as their call-in number.

**Posted by Paul Jeffries** December 13, 2024 10:10 pm

Binson Echorec wrote:
ig wrote:
#KIDS Toll Free, anywhere in Canada.

Say it out loud.
I love stuff like this. However, thanks to social media, I initially read it as "hashtag kids". Nobody under 35 knows it as a pound sign, and nobody under 90 knows it as an octothorpe.

I'm 57, and when we were kids we called it a tic tac toe sign.

PJ