For almost seven decades, phone-company customers all over the nation could pick up the phone, dial WE6-1212 or some variant, and get a recording of the local weather forecast and hourly temperature, humidity, wind and barometer readings "any time."

It's a tradition that grew out of complaints that the old U.S. Weather Bureau never answered the phone. And it's a tradition that will end in the Philadelphia region on Wednesday.

As it has in most areas of the country, Verizon has decided to suspend a service that is a vestige of its Bell Telephone Co. roots.

Why? Verizon says it is costly and unprofitable, and fewer and fewer people are calling in an era when a phone line can't compete with the immense amounts of cost-free instantaneous weather information available on the Web and elsewhere.

The weather line might have been dull to the point of anesthetizing, but its demise is a source of sadness among meteorologists of, shall we say, a certain vintage.

Glenn Schwartz, chief meteorologist at NBC10, recalled being a chronic user, and Paul Knight, founder of the Weather Communications group and the state climatologist, admitted to being a recidivist.

"That was high tech when there was no such thing as high tech," said Evan Myers, chief operating officer of AccuWeather.

Myers grew up in a West Oak Lane house that was among the most weather-conscious in the country.

His older brother, Joel, who went on to found AccuWeather, lobbied successfully to have the property designated a government observation site in the 1950s.

The Myerses had every measuring device available, Evan Myers recalled, but the phone and those deadly recordings, read dutifully by Bell employees and repeated every 30 seconds, were the lifelines to the latest forecast and official observations that were supposed to be updated hourly.

"I used to call it all the time," said his colleague Elliot Abrams. He would memorize the recording and then call his grandmother, a pharmacist in South Philadelphia, and ape the operator. "I used to pride myself on remembering the thing word for word."

At one time, the recorded forecasts were state-of-the-art sensations.

Government records date the service to 12:01 a.m., April 8, 1939, when it began in New York City. It was an instant smash.

The Commerce Department, the weather service's parent agency, reported that a snow flurry in New York on April 12, 1938, generated a blizzard of calls - 3,000 in just an hour. More than 850,000 calls were made during July 1940. In 1945, the annual count was 14.6 million.

Because the calls were subject to the standard rates, no doubt they were a boon to the phone company, but the U.S. Weather Bureau wasn't complaining, and it encouraged other offices to set up similar lines. Soon the service spread to Washington, Detroit, Boston, Philadelphia, all over.

What was in it for the weather bureau? Peace.

Before the service started, the New York office had been overwhelmed with phone inquiries. So many callers complained that the New York office would never answer the phone or return calls that the phone company investigated.

The solution was an automated phone system whose technology was modeled after another popular phone-company feature, the TI6-1212 time line, featuring a robotic voice repeating such witticisms as "At the tone, the time will be 8:41 and 50 seconds." Oh, Verizon will be ditching that, too.

Weather, a tad more unpredictable than time, requires frequent updating. Via teletype, the bureau sent hourly temperatures and forecasts, revised four times a day, to the phone-company office.

An operator read it all into a microphone, and it was recorded on magnetic tape. Anyone who dialed WE6-1212 automatically got the recording.

The government suggested the number be formatted nationally so that all one had to do was dial an area code and the number to get the weather almost anywhere in the nation.

After the Bell breakup, the service was inherited by Bell Atlantic, then by its successor, Verizon.

Five years ago, however, Verizon decided to phase out the weather line region by region, rather than upgrade its equipment, said Verizon spokesman Eric Rabe.

He added that while the weather and time lines may have nostalgic value for the older set, if you mentioned them to 20-year-olds, "they would look at you like you were from Mars."

"This is just the passing of the torch," said Verizon spokeswoman Sharon Shaffer. "We're in a different age of technology."