One evening last year Joseph Jaarus, 19, of Grand Rapids dialed local radio station WLAV to ask that Disk Jockey Tom Quain play his favorite number, I Need You. As usual, the line was busy. But just as he was about to hang up, Joseph thought he heard a babble of voices through the beeps of the busy signal. "Hello?" he ventured, curiously. "HELLO!" shouted some of the voices. Joseph Jaarus had made contact with the beep line.
Greatest Since Kissing. The beep line comes and goes among teen-agers all over the U.S.—a kind of electronic equivalent of the old-fashioned tree trunk on which people used to hang messages. It is partly just fad and fun, partly a way of getting dates.
It works because, on much of the nation's telephone equipment, every call reaching a busy number is shunted away into a ganglion where the busy signal is produced. It is possible, therefore, for everyone getting the same signal to communicate between the beeps on a giant conference call that sounds like a convention of tomcats in an aviary.
"It's pretty difficult to understand anybody," cheerfully admits David Silver, 20, of Grand Rapids, Mich., "but you sure get to know a lot of kids that way." "It's frantic, really," says Karen Dingle of Dexter, Mich. "The best way to use the beep line is just to ask for vital information such as 'How old are you?' and 'What do you look like?' and 'Are you a boy or a girl?' and 'What's your telephone number?' Once you have the telephone number, it's easier to talk over the regular line—but it isn't as much fun."
Some call it "Dial-a-Date." In Dallas, they call it "The Grapevine." "It just might be the greatest social game since kissing. It sure leads to that, anyway," says one graduate aficionado.
Louder & Louder. Not surprisingly, the telephone company feels that this kind of kissing has to stop. It tends to jam up circuits when one beeper sets up a line by dialing his own number and passing the word around. Beepers who use the numbers of local radio stations or weather bureaus make service useless for large segments of the public.
In Fall River, Mass., Gene Murphy, the telephone company's business manager, finally found out what was playing hob with the service when he chanced on an item in the teenagers' column of a suburban weekly that gave the new beep number—a radio station's recorded weather-reporting service. He discovered that in one week the number of "busy" calls made to the station had jumped from 1,495 to 27,928. Murphy boosted the sound of the busy signal, but the teen-agers just shouted louder. So he had technicians do a job of special rewiring on the station's lines to block any outside noise.
The kids, of course, can switch to another number. "They're going to be tough to beat," says Murphy, and Fall River Beeper Tommy Bianda bears him out. "Everybody's doing it, man," exults Tommy. "It's really kicks!"