1/ Don't knock pagers - for their day they were a pretty advanced technology. And as my further ramblings show, MUCH tougher than any modern posh 3/4G phone.
2/ In production we didn't measure the crystal. In the lab at design time we measured a sample ( they were very repeatable). and then chose the series L and (variable) C so as to be able to pull it +/-5ppm. Those values were stuffed on the PCB and so the C could be used to adjust any 2.5ppm crystal to 0.05ppm on production test. It took about 5 seconds.
Allan