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The early phone company for the Tampa Bay Area was Peninsular Telephone, which actually had a history going back into the 1890's, when the Brorein Brothers put phones into their market at Bradenton so people could order groceries. Broreins' Marlets grew so successfully that they opened stroes in cities around Tampa Bay and putting phone lines into each. The phone business eventually became more important to the Broreins than the grocery business.
Telephone industry historians record that Tampa at one time had a half-dozen or more phone companies by WWI days, but the Broreins ultimately wound up buying out all the competition. Last, and most significant, was Southern Bell selling out its Tampa local phone operations to Peninsular in the 1920's, as one of the final actions of the Bell System complying with its 1913 anti-trust settlement with the Feds. It did leave Tampa in a rather unusual phone situation, with Southern Bell running the long distance terminal in Peninsular's building on Morgan Street, the only place in the nation where Southern Bell ran a "toll testboard" from a major city, to the outside world.
Now, it takes a bit of understanding of the olde-tyme Telco business to get a feel for the Peninsular plant. You see, being a "non-Bell" phone company was not an easy life. Ma Bell's Western Electric simply would not sell to independent telcos. They had to get hardware from wherever they could-- and Peninsular did just that. Every telco office was a hodgepodge of pieces from different manufacturers. For example, the original St. Pete "main" exchange (numbers starting with "7") had at first been a room of 1920's Strowger step switches, which was expanded by a surrounding room of 1930's step switches from, I believe, Northern Electric of Canada. The Peninsular people somehow cobbled this and other equipment together and kept it working after a fashion.
One anomaly caused by all of this was that by the time GTE took over, the Peninsular folks had, in their linking together of all this stuff, a situation in which St. Pete had five, six and seven-digit phone numbers at the same time, especially downtown. As a result, numbers like 5-2131, 52-2131 and the problem child...525-2131 all existed for different places.
Enter WLCY and the beginning of the Top 40 era. Moving out to Gandy Boulevard from downtown, we had some local phones put in. Now it can be told, but at the outset, Peninsular didn't even have a local cable out on Gandy Boulevard. When the WLCY-predecessor WTSP 5kW AM plant was built, Peninsular just cut into a St. Pete-Tampa "toll cable" and brought 26 pairs of it into the WTSP building. They did the same down the road at WSUN. The other end of our "wires" was clear downtown at the main telephone building, and for some years, the transmitter phone out on Gandy was 7-1966, even though there were a couple of other local exchange switches between Gandy and downtown. By the time we moved (recently changed to) WLCY's studios from the Times Building, out to Gandy Blvd, GTE had taken over and had laid some local cables. WLCY got 525-2131 for a number.
When Sam Rahall swiped Roy Nilsson and the Swinging Gents from WALT and run the ratings up as high as the 60's (I swear it did that, on both Pulse and Hooper surveys!), a contest call from the jocks would literally swamp GTE. So many kids would get connected to the busy signal that the level of it's "baaaaap-baaaaap-baaaaap" dropped down low enough the kids discovered somebody else was on there with them. Calling WLCY and meeting people on the busy tone became a sort of sport for awhile. This irritated GTE to no end. They retaliated by cranking up the busy tone level to its max. While school was in session, this would mean an ear-shattering busy signal level in northeast St. Pete.
But the ominous part came along soon. It seems that other important numbers were similar to 525-2131, enough so that kids misdialing and the old leftover Peninsular switches stumbled so much that 5-2131, the hospital emergency room downtown, 3-2141 (WSUN) and 525-2141, the sheriff's department (among others), got kids all over their phones looking to win the hourly contest for a free record album. They all complained, both to WLCY and GTE. It was necessary to agree not to run contests during critical hours, like Saturday night, in order to maintain public calm. WLCY did have, and demonstrated, it could kill the public phone network -- something that Home Shopping Network didn't do 'till decades later. (And that's yet another Tampa Bay telco war story.)
Of course, in the years which followed, the telcos came up with "choke exchanges" and such for radio contest lines. But, we might claim another WLCY "first" as being among the first in the nation to kill the phone network.
The problem with the phone lines was still going on in the early 1970's. Everyone had named the phone line with the busy signals the "Spook Line." I met a telephone man who worked near the station's studios and, since he was a great fan of WLCY, he would remove the busy signal from the Spook Line and folks were able to talk freely to each other without the annoying honking sound in your ear. I think we figured out one night that the Spook Line was limited to only five to seven persons on, at one time. It seems we did a roll call several times and that was the amount of people that would be there at any one time. As with all technology, the famous WLCY Spook Line mysteriously disappeared one day and was never heard from again.
Webmaster's comment: Just to clear any possible confusion, the term "spook" was not meant as a racial slur. Former WLCY staffer George Nix tells me the phone line was called that because, well, it was kind of "spooky." As he says, "You never knew who would be on the other end of that line..."
