KH-1-7400/7490. UTOG (United Taxi Owners Guild).

The Internet is an amazing place sometimes.

A year or so ago I posted this image from the film "Taxi Driver". The image showed a yellow cab with what appeared to be an old-style phone number on the trunk of the car.

That phone number, KH1-7400, confounded me, because it just doesn't look like a typical telephone exchange name number. Most exchange names start with the first 2 letters of a real word. Commonly-used New York City exchange names, for example, included RAvenswood, ESplanade, and PLaza among many others.

I added the KH1 sighting to my collection of telephone exchange name sightings anyway, imagining someone might find it and offer proof that this was a real number. In the meantime I reached out to a New York City exchange names expert who assuredly told me that KH1 was never a genuine telephone exchange in New York City.

Recently, however, proof that KH1 was a valid telephone exchange arrived in the form of an e-mail from John F. F.. John had been rummaging through old calling cards when he found this one from UTOG (United Taxi Owners Guild). The old calling card clearly gives KH1-7400 as the number to call, though evidently the number was changed at some point to KH1-7490.

According to John:

"The number was the 2-way radio dispatch number (in Queens I believe); call that number and usually a medallion Checker cab picked you up in about 5 minutes."

"I know --  I used it too many times to get me home from mid-town Manhattan to Staten Island in the 1960's and 70's."

Referring to the scene from "Taxi Driver" John adds:

"The cab in the photo may simply have been parked when the scene was shot."

That's a pretty cool connection. Who would have thought someone would reach this or any other web site by dialing up an old KH1- telephone number? I was satisfied, too, to know that Martin Scorsese, director of "Taxi Driver", did not find some reason to pad this great film with something as trivial as a nonsense phone number. That is one of the many things about movies that drives me crazy: the fake telephone numbers, invariably starting with "555". These numbers, so obviously fake, detract significantly from any sense of realism in a story.

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• Telephone Exchange Names / Movies and Television