Long distance calls in 1963

Ciouls you place a call from New Orleans or Dallas to Houston without being connected by an exchange operator?

I may be wrong, but I would guess yes. I believe my dad in Michigan was able to call his sister in Texas directly, but it was expensive. Again, I'm guessing here. Memory is hazy.

Details of the time, date, phone number, destination city and duration of such a call would be provided in the billing statement.

This website presents telephony history in Texas.
https://www.angelo.edu/community/west-texas-collection/virtual-exhibits/museum-of-telephony.php
Under the heading "Struggle to Keep Up 1950-1970", there is the following:

Sherman is 60 miles from Dallas. Probably a test implementation before scaling up for the big city.
Seems that it would have been well established in Dallas by 1963 as well as in the other major cities.

This site details history of the necessary switching machines:
https://telephoneworld.org/long-distance-companies/att-long-distance-network/history-of-att-long-lines/historical-4a-4m-crossbar-tandem-list/
Dallas and New Orleans were among the earliest cities to get them in 1951 and 1953, respectively:

These thirteen machines were originally called #A4A machines. This
stood for “Anticipated” #4 “Advanced”. They were originally installed
withOUT any card-translator boxes, however they were manufactured for
“easy” addition of card-translators when they became perfected for use
in 1953. Unfortunately, I don’t have the dates that these machines
added their card-translators, other than that it was during/after 1953.

Thanks for all the replies!

The question was based the phone cal. Oswald made to the Houston home of Horace Twiford.

According to Mrs Twiford, she assumed the call came from within Houston as there was no operator involved. 

I can recall in the early 70s here as a kid, we lived about the same distance from Sydney as Irving is from Dallas. You could call Sydney direct but it was a metered toll call. 

I tend to think he probably did make the call from within Houston, even though it looks like I can't rule out it having been made from New Orleans or elsewhere.