Sound-alike street names must go

Nowadays, when you call the police, this is what they see:

But 50 years ago (even 20 years ago, says Chief Thomas Browne), there was no visual element. You were just a voice; sometimes a garbled voice. Combine that with sound-alike street names in town, and we’d occasionally see emergency vehicles showing up at the wrong locations. Selectmen pondered changing the names of many streets:

Emergency workers are now trained about tricky names as part of their recruitment, and dispatchers know to carefully articulate the problematic names. So it’s a solved problem. If you call police or fire, they’ll find you, even if you call from Maryvale Road. Uh, make that Meadowvale. Or from Stony Brook. No, Sandy Brook.

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Other happenings in September, 1975:

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