That's correct. There was a very lengthy intermediate period, ranging from the introduction of dial telephones to as late as I believe the '70s in some areas (Santa Catalina island off LA comes to mind as an area with manual operators extremely late), where some areas had dial telephones and others had operators - and for some time long distance trunks were split the same way!
This means that some people had dial service but, to make a long distance call, had to speak with an operator. Other people had manual operator service, but when they wanted to make a long-distance call the operator would connect them to the trunk and then dial for them. For this reason many later-model telephone switchboards had a rotary dial built into the desk.
Customers also weren't necessarily expected to have dialing down pat early on, either. To this day, the error messages that you hear if you e.g. call a phone number that does not exist are referred to as "intercepts." The reason for this is that on early dial phone systems, when a customer encountered an error the line would be flagged as needing attention and a human operator would "intercept" the call to help the customer. These days this function is always performed by a boring recording, which starts with the SIT tones - another system of beep codes intended to tell automated dialers what went wrong.
In about 1999, on holiday with my parents in the USA, we had to make a long-distance call from a payphone (somewhere in the Rocky Mountains to Michigan, or something like that). I remember helping my dad to feed in the quarters as fast as possible, as the huge cost of the call — $6 or something — plus the low value of American coins meant the machine rejected the call before we could pay for it.
On about the third or fourth try, an operator came on the line! I guess that's a real "intercept". I don't remember what he did, he spoke to my dad, but the call was made.
(We were on a very long road trip, and there was some problem with the car we'd borrowed from American relatives.)
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