When daylight-saving time ended early this month, Joyce Barteck thought her husband, Don, had done what he usually did to ensure he reset their home's clocks to the proper time: call 936-1212.

But unbeknownst to his wife, Mr. Barteck actually had programmed the clocks after checking the time as displayed on his cellular telephone.

So the West Toledo couple didn't discover that Toledo's time-and-temperature telephone number - begun five decades ago - was no longer in service. Time & Weather Inc., of suburban Dayton, quietly shut it down on Aug. 15.

"I could not get sponsors" on a consistent basis, Marcia Woodward, Time & Weather's president, said yesterday.

In recent times, she said, revenue from the sponsors of time-and-temperature phone lines in Cleveland, Columbus, and Dayton was effectively subsidizing the Toledo line, but that was no longer acceptable.

Steve France, news director at WUPW-TV, Channel 36, said Time & Weather offered the line to his television station, which had provided its weather forecasts, but the local Fox affiliate decided to let it go because of the more than $10,000 cost to buy the equipment and an $800,000 annual phone bill.

Toledo is far from alone in losing this once-popular service.

The 936-1212 number, once common for time-and-temperature updates across the country, no longer works in such major markets as New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

At the lunch table in the Eleanor Kahle Senior Center where she eats with friends two days per week, Mrs. Barteck conceded that she once called the local time-and-weather line regularly, but much more rarely of late.

"Not every day, but a lot of the time, especially when the kids were in school," she recalled. "It was so easy to do."

"That's probably why they discontinued it, because people aren't using it like they used to," tablemate Brenda Davis offered.

According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, time-and-temperature lines started in New York in the 1930s, when the then-U.S. Weather Bureau became overwhelmed by citizen inquiries about local weather conditions, and offered its data to the local telephone company if the latter would handle the calls.

Time & Weather Inc. said its Ohio services dated back to the Ohio Bell information lines that began in the 1950s.

When AT&T's Bell System was broken up during the 1980s, those services were handed down to the regional telephone service providers, including Ameritech in Ohio.

In recent times, the regional providers have merged again - but by the time Ameritech successor SBC merged back into AT&T, the time-and-temperature line had already been spun off.

James Carracher, a spokesman for AT&T Ohio, said SBC gradually got out of that business "about eight years ago," handing it off to other companies.

"There are a number of factors that led to the decision, including the fact that calls to the time announcement had steadily decreased," Mr. Carracher said.

"Customers have access to accurate time information from a variety of sources, including televisions, wireless telephones, their computers, and other devices," he said.

Ms. Woodward said her business took over the Toledo line and those in Cleveland, Columbus, and Dayton in 2005.

And even though the Toledo line was still receiving as many as 360,000 calls a month, it just wasn't making any money, Ms. Woodward said.

"People just didn't have any interest in advertising on Time & Weather," Ms. Woodward said. "Maybe it was because we couldn't give them any demographics" - background information about the callers like age and income.

After the Toledo time-and-temperature phone line was disconnected, Mr. France said, WUPW handled "a dozen, maybe 20" calls from people wondering what had happened to it, but those inquiries quickly died out.

Time-and-temperature lines continue operating, though - especially in smaller communities under local sponsorship.

Huntington Bank still runs a time-and-weather line in Bowling Green, with an advertisement for its services preceding the information.

Contact David Patch at:

dpatch@theblade.com

or 419-724-6094.

First Published November 15, 2008, 3:08 p.m.