I was able to learn a few things about the board by examining the front. The upper three rows of jacks on the vertical panels were used for internal extensions. Starting from the bottom of the upper three rows on the right, the jacks are numbered 10-19. The bottom of the upper three rows on the left contains jacks 20-29. Moving to the right are 30-39. The next row up on the left panel have 40-49. Moving to the right are 50-59, and the top row on the left has 60-69. The bottom two rows on each panel are the central office (i.e. outside) lines. Some are "local", some are for Los Angeles, and some are for Orange County. The big red light at the bottom of the left panel is the fuse alarm. The four holes below the shelf are two headset jacks. The holder on the top left corner of the board holds a very old looking (and uncomfortable) headset (visible in the second picture on the previous page).
"Where is local?" I wondered. I was able to determine this board was used in Long Beach, California two ways. First, on the shelf in front of the dial is a sticker that says "Use local lines for these prefixes". Looking up the prefixes (the ones that are still at all visible) in what used to be the 213 area code yields a list of communities centered around Long Beach. In addition, to the right of the jack field are the remains of a sticker that I think listed Long Beach emergency services phone numbers. All that is left are the letters "ONG BEA" and parts of phone numbers. If the board is from Long Beach, I surmised, then it is probably an Automatic Electric board because Long Beach is a GTE area, and Automatic Electric is GTE's manufacturing arm whereas Western Electric was the manufacturing arm of the Bell System.
The cords are in pairs, a "front" cord and a "back" cord. Most probably, the front cords were used to answer outside lines and dial out over them. The back cords were used to connect outside lines to inside extensions. Each cord has a lever. The levers have 3 positions: forward, middle, and back. The forward position would have been used to talk on the line or extension the cord is plugged into. Middle is the resting position where the operator is not connected to the cord circuit. Back may have been to ring an extension or perform some other type of call control. In addition to the cord levers, there are two other levers, one to the left of the cord levers and one to the right. The one to the left is labelled "DIAL REAR" (forward) / "SPLIT" (back). The one to the right is labelled "TALK ON SPLIT" (forward) / "DIAL RLS" (back).
I thought that the distinctive key hole and plaque would give me some information about the make, model, or age of this board. Someone who knows about these things, however, told me that they all have the same kind of key hole. As for the plaque, since the top part has been rubbed off, all that remains is "CHICAGO 7, ILL." and a number D780585 A1. All the location tells me is that the plaque was made before two letter state abbreviations (IL) and zip codes (60607) were deployed in 1963. The number is apparently the part number of the plaque itself and doesn't give any clues about the board.
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