Old neighborhood exchange lives on

This is the story of my grandparents? telephone number ? Eastern 7-5254 ? the only one they ever had; the one assigned to them by the Chesapeake & Potomac Telephone Co. before numbers replaced neighborhood exchanges. Long before you had to use an area code to make a local call.

The number, known as 410-327-5254 after I inherited the house that went with it, is long dead in Baltimore. But it lives on ? improbably, magically ? in Los Angeles.