Knowing your love of the oldies and putting on my old phone company hat, I deduced that this is really "Beechwood 45789" which is the name of a song recorded by the Marvelettes in 1962. In the olden days, the phone companies assigned words to the first two digits of the phone number: 23 is Beechwood. In my home town, 82 was "Van Dyke" 47757 (824-7757). Many of us in those days had 5 digit dialing, But the phone company still needed to keep all the numbers straight, so they always identified a telephone line by the entire 7 digits and just made up the words as they went along so that it sounded good.
The song "Beechwood 45789) went to #7 on the R&B chart and #17 on the Pop chart in '62.
On the earliest songs recorded by the group, Gladys Horton sang the lead. Therefore, she is the person in the song saying...
This particular song is attributed to William Stevenson, Marvin Gaye, and George Gordy and was recorded on the Tamla label now known as the MOTOWN label.
The Marvelettes were one of the first of the fabulous girl groups to put >great rock-and-roll songs on the charts in the 60's.
The group was formed by Gladys Horton and others at Inkster High School in Inkster, Michigan (a suburb of Detroit) in the early 60's as the Marvels. The original group members were Horton, Georgeanna Marie Tillman, Katherine Anderson, Juanita Cowart and Wanda Young. They originally got together to enter a talent contest, but a teacher put them in touch with Berry Gordy. Gordy liked what he saw, changed their name to the Marvelettes, and signed them to a contract with Tamla.
Georgeanna had co-written a song that was to become their first -- and biggest -- hit in 1961. "Please Mr. Postman" launched a career that would >see the group put 23 songs in the top 100 before disbanding in 1969. Both Young and Horton sang lead, but Horton sang lead on the earliest songs. All of the Marvelettes' hits were recorded on the Tamla label.
Some of the stories that I read about this group talked about this High School talent contest and how they did not win and were not scheduled to go to be heard by the record company big shots, but someone asked that they be >sent along anyway. And they were heard and the rest is history.
Wow, Alicia, that's everything I could possibly want to know about the Marvelettes. Thanks for taking the time to fill all of us in on the rest of the story.
Charges are pending. (Ed. I have no idea where Randy's parents were or whether he had their permission to be driving so late on Saturday evening. I presume there's no curfew in Palmetto but perhaps they don't know that you must be 16 to drive at night in Florida. I think Randy'll rack up enough points to get his license suspended even before he receives one - which can be at 15 in Florida for daylight driving only).
Bumper sticker - "Horn broke, watch for finger"
Going Up in Smoke - David McLean, 73, a movie and television actor who appeared for many years as the rugged Marlboro Man in television commercials, died in October 1995 of lung cancer. He joined Wayne McLaren, who portrayed the Marlboro Man in print ads and who died in 1992 at age 51, also of lung cancer. Is there a connection there? I think so. He who lives by the butt, dies by the butt.
Oops! - A cable television company in Oroville, CA mistakenly broadcast a test message from the National Weather Service warning that the Oroville Dam had burst.