Reality Check by Dave Whamond for May 25, 2023

Loved those old things, especially the yellow pages.

ah … the sweet old days

Stop being a jerk, Ralph! :-D

And you had to PAY if you wanted to be unlisted! Kind of a form of extortion, now that I think about it.

My first job… when I came to France… in 2003 was delivering those…

Couple of years later… I collected 44 tons of paper from a factory in Blois… delivered it to a printer in Trafford Park Industrial Estate, Manchester… where they printed l’Annuaire… and brought them back to France…

Remember when those companies that wanted to be first in the phone book, would add letters to their name to put them at the beginning alphabetically!? Like AA Automotive Repair… or sump’n similar. FIRST!

We got a Yellow Pages book in the mail last week. It was about 8″ × 10″ and only a half inch thick. Hard to use that as a booster seat…

I miss phone books. They made great booster seats for kids.

I had a fake name for my phone book listing. It was something silly, but I still got junk mail and solicitous phone calls asking for that “person”. A few of those person search “services” still have that name – showing that old phone number.

Ah, those halcon days of yore, before computers were used to make billions of robocalls.

Worse, the reverse directory.

We used to get THREE of them a year.

“Johnson, Navin R! This is the kind of spontaneous publicity – your name in print – that MAKES people!”

The new phone books are here! the ne phone books are here! I am Somebody

I just got a local book….I remember sitting my kids on them to reach the table! LOL

The Toronto white pages were 4 1/2" thick.

Even Nathan?

Hmmm … makes one wonder

if “password hell” is really worth it ….

He hates these cans!

My employee ID had my SSN right below my picture

“You know the name…look up the number!”

—slogan on the cover of a British telephone book that inspired the Beatles (and some friends) to get silly in the studio

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMhKWOP6EZQ

Back when most people had a moral compass it was advantageous for others to have access to your personal information. Those days are long gone.

And, unlike the internet’s, it worked.

in June ‘59, I was 16 and too stupid to get a girl’s name and number, but told my pal to write down her address. Found the address in the phone book (last name in the ‘Ts’, married in ’63, she passed in ’17.

Nowadays, if you still get them, the pages are great for windows & mirrors..

And you had to pay to keep your name & number & address out of the book, just like DeleteMe & others for the internet “book”…

Waaaaaay before 1987

City directories were old even when the white pages first came out. I’ve done some genealogy using a “business directory” from the 1800s.

And now they SELL you the same information. “They” not being the phone companies.

That looks much more like a book than a phone.

For me, the timing was perfect — those things went by the wayside around the same time that I began to need my reading glasses to read them.

Rush it to the outhouse and put it next to the Sears catalog

Before 1950 they printed occupation, spouses name in the city directory. Even if you didn’t have a phone. City directories go back before the 1840’s