Murray Hill 8-9933, and that was before my time; that
was the number you could call when Major Bowes was
doing the show on radio (and maybe in the early days
of the television show), but although I've heard of it,
I don't remember Ted Mack referring to it (after all,
I didn't discover his show until the 1960s).
There was also such a thing, on radio and for many years
on television, as the "honor city"; phone banks were set
up in a selected city and residents of that city could vote
by a special phone number. That, too, had disappeared by
the '60s.
I think the reason the telephone voting was discontinued may
be related to the switch from live to tape; I have some recordings
of Major Bowes' shows where he periodically announces how the
voting is going; Mack, on tape, couldn't possibly do that. In fact,
whereas in the live days the winner of the voting got to come back
the next week, on tape it might be weeks before a winner got a second
appearance and I--at least--had usually forgotten that person.
One piece of trivia: if I've read correctly, on the first television show
(January 18, 1948) phone banks were set up in the four cities that carried
it: New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington.
