Short Stuff: Phone Books

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Hey, welcome to the short stuff. Ciao. Cheers. Dave, let's go, nostalgic. That's right.

I mean, there's a slew of websites used to research this,

“but I mean, honestly, we could just say from our own brains.”

Because there wasn't a lot in here that like we just didn't know. It was growing up in the time that we grew up again. Because this is about phone books. And if you're of a certain age, you know exactly what we're talking about. If you're not of a certain age yet, you might be surprised to know that at a certain point in time,

if you wanted to, I don't know, take your card of the shop or find a florist or a dry cleaner. You couldn't just go on the internet to do that or whip out your phone. You would bring out a 17 pound book that was eight inches thick. Drop it on your kitchen table and wake up your entire family on a Saturday morning. And you would start letting your, well, I'm not going to say it.

You would start thumbing through that thing. Looking under the florist section or the laundromat section to find a business to give your money to. Yeah. Very cute.

That is how you found businesses, it's how you found people to because the business part was in the second half of the phone book.

It was all in yellow pages. The first part was white pages and those were residential listings. Yeah, or they were two different books entirely. It could be if you lived in a fancy pants area, you know, like Atlanta, like Westchester or something like that. Yeah.

But the white pages, this is another thing that the reason I love doing this one Chuck is because this is the to me the first time which would be like you have grown up in a world where you can't really understand. The world that this thing existed in in shape. This is a great example of it. And one of the things that stuck out to me was explaining the white pages where where you could go and say I'm looking for Charles W Chuck Bryant. So I'm going to go to the bees of the white pages and start looking through the brides until I find all the Charles and I know Chuck lives in Atlanta.

So I'm going to find Chuck's address in Atlanta. And then at the end of that is Chuck's phone number and I'm going to pick up my phone and dial the numbers that is in this publicly available book. Maybe even I'll get tired of waiting for the for him to answer all hang up and just drive to his house, which I now know exactly where it is because his address is listed under his full name. With his phone number in the phone book along with everybody else in town. Yeah, and you would just knock on my door if you wanted to speak to me and I know that we were sending a large number of our listeners into a complete and utter panic.

Yeah, at the thought of someone knocking on their door just to pop in and say hello or whatever. But just think about how much the world has changed in that respect. Oh, yeah, you don't even call someone anymore without texting and say, can I call right now? It's very strange. This is a different world. It was a totally different world.

“The, well, you know, another funny tangent to that is I also remember a day where if you were like let's say new someone's name, but you didn't really know where they lived and you didn't know them that well.”

You needed their phone numbers. So you looked it up and they were like six Josh Clarks and you would start calling random Josh Clarks and say are you the Josh Clark that I met at camp summer camp this summer or the parents of so like you would go like, you know, that's the whole plot of the initial terminators. He's killing random Sarah Connor. Oh, yeah, because he looks up Sarah Connor in the phone book. But you would totally do that. I did that to you. I mean, like you would do something like that and it was and people understood it would be like, oh, that's that's a different guy. Sorry. Good luck. Good luck.

Oh, man, so great. And this was not like 300 years ago.

And that's why you would see like a one plumber or a one florist is because they would be listed first. I never knew that. And I feel like a dummy because it's so obvious.

“Oh, no, I mean, like that's, but yeah, that's what I would call my business. We should have called this a one step. You should know pocket.”

A one five. Yeah, no, it totally makes sense. It was called gaming the system, I think. And that's right. So for about a hundred years, like this is how you may contact with the outside world. This is how you searched for things in the outside world. It's really hard to wrap your head around now, but you just pull the book out. And I think we take a little break. Come back and talk a little more about the history of the phone book after well this break.

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I'm Yamanika, and I'm out. Listen to your problem with Yamanika on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Alright, we're back. We're talking phone books.

The first phone directory we talked a little bit about in our telephone episode, I think.

It was published in 1878, New Haven, Connecticut, and had about 50 subscribers.

“That's what they were called at the time on a single piece of paper listed.”

As phones spread around, obviously the phone book got bigger and bigger. To the point where, like I mentioned, we had a full white pages and a full yellow pages. And they were very big books. I think the last editions of the New York City, well maybe not the last, because there are still phone books if you have a landline, believe it or not. But the New York City phone books came in multiple volumes at the, like, last quarter of the 20th century.

And they were so thick that, like, if you were a kid in high school, you might have a strong person team come around to do a little show for you at an afternoon assembly. And inevitably they would blow up a hot water bottle and burst it. And to the burst, and they would, somebody would rip a phone book in half, which was seemingly really hard to do. Okay, I do, I have no recollection of seeing an assembly like that. Like, did you see that?

It sounds like, oh yeah. That's a firsthand account. Yeah, we had a strong, strong, man team come around and do, like, feet of strength for the high school afternoon.

“But did they, like, legitimize it by just saying, like, also don't do drugs at the end?”

Oh, probably. Yeah. Wow. That's really something. Yeah.

I don't remember, wait, but I don't remember anything like that. Where do you think they ripped a phone books? Just, like, untied.

I'm that's incredible or whatever.

Yeah. Exactly. I've got to see it live, buddy. Wow. Go redan.

Hs. That's right. The redan redheads. Yeah, the raiders. That's right.

That was close. Yeah. So one of the things, like, if you were, if you had a phone, like, you just got a phone book. It was free, like, they were disposable, like, you just thought nothing of the phone book. But it turns out they were, like, big, big business for AT&T and then later on for a bunch of other companies.

But AT&T, according to a 1986 article,

Just off of the money at charged businesses across the country to be listed in the yellow pages. And that's, like, $13 billion today. That's a lot. That's, like, lunch at Apple. Yeah.

I mean, this is a ton of money. And I even looked up. I was, like, I wonder if there was a sort of a weird little hidden search charge for, like, the customer to be listed.

And apparently not, apparently, you were never ever charged to be listed in the phone book.

You did have to pay to get unlisted, which a lot of states eventually, like, introduce, like, house bills and stuff. They're, like, this is a scam. You can't just list somebody's name in a dress and say, "You got to pay us to not do that." That's the story. Yeah.

“So I think a lot of those ended up being successful.”

But, you know, AT&T was, was selling those, not only just a spot in the yellow pages, but you could pay a lot more money to get, like, larger ads and stuff in the yellow pages to get more notice. And they would market that stuff. And, you know, almost set it earlier, but I didn't want to let it slip. But a very famous one.

It was in 1962. I could have sworn it was a 70s, because it clearly went through the 70s. Definitely. Uh, was literature fingers through the walking. Uh, ad campaign.

The idea of, hey, let your fingers do the walking. Instead of your body, like, don't walk around downtown, looking for your florist. Just let your fingers do that. And then give them a call instead. Exactly.

And I mean, that was kind of revolutionary as far as things went at least in the mid century.

And I said that AT&T made a bunch of money off of the yellow pages. The reason why it was just that was because they had a monopoly on the phone system in the US, which I'm sure we covered as well in that phone exchange episode. But, um, there was finally broken up. The government granted monopoly.

They're like, you guys are too big. We're going to break up in the regional providers. Like Northwestern Bell, Southern Bell, that kind of stuff. And so all those companies, these sub companies. Now, we're printing yellow pages and they were making money. But because Bell no longer had a monopoly, that also opened the door for private companies to start making their own yellow pages.

There was just a lot of money walking around because this is how people found businesses. It was either driving past and seeing a business that had their phone number. On the sign or you went to the yellow pages. It was as simple as that. So you had a lot of incentive to advertise in the in the yellow pages.

And so companies had a lot of incentive to publish yellow pages. And so the number of phone books that came to one person's house started to boom. I think in the 1990s, in some parts of California, you might get 10 different phone books delivered to your house every year. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, obviously especially in a place like California or, you know, Washington state Seattle, Washington. People would be like, hey, wait a minute, this is like a pretty awful thing to do.

Like the amount of waste that's happening here. I remember early, I mean, this is a long time ago now, but not that long ago. But the internet was around and there were still phone books being delivered.

“And I remember seeing a comedian joke about, I think the joke was something about printing a small portion of the internet.”

And throwing it on my porch once a year. I was so that was pretty funny. But everyone, you know, it was pretty clear like what a wasteful thing.

I think half a billion phone books were being delivered.

650,000 tons of paper every year by 1991. And up to fill up 2 million cubic yards of landfill space, even though you could probably recycle that stuff. So they initially started doing like recycled paper and stuff like that. Seattle, like I mentioned, I think was one of the first ones to say like, you know, we're going to start charging phone bookmakers a 14 cents per phone book delivered within the city.

And a people elect to not have a phone book, but they still throw one on your porch. Like that's a $150 fund. Yeah. Knowing me, Justice Police, I would have immediately gone to the trouble of filling out like the five page form to complain. It makes sure that that company got fine.

I totally would. Yeah. I opted out. You got to touch of the justice policing, YouTube. Yeah, for sure.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We don't like bad guys getting all this stuff. Justice. Yeah.

“So despite the environmental thing, I think basically converting to recycled paper,”

helped a lot of people and training people like you said, like these things can actually be easily recycled. That kind of simmered people down about the environmental part. So that's not what did away with phone books. And there were like three things in pretty quick succession that really started to take the yellow pages down at least. So 4011, that was information.

All of a sudden you could dial that for free starting in the 80s. And now you didn't even have to look in the phone book. You could just call up and be like to start reading some plumbers names off to me and their phone numbers.

Exactly, that's right. And then of course, you know, the internet coming along had everything to do with it. And also in 2004, Congress passed a law that said you can't put cell phone numbers in phone books. So they were on the way to doing that.

So it basically was whittled down to just landlines.

And then once the internet came around as far as businesses go, the yellow pages wasn't as necessary. But, you know, they're all still around because there are still landlines.

“And, you know, who advertises in the yellow pages still?”

Who? Ricks in a broken. Emily's dad and Senaco Glass has auto glass repair shop in Cowgafalls, Ohio. If unless it's changed, we were talking one day and he was saying, yeah, I still advertise in the yellow pages. A lot of people around here still use landlines.

Still looks stuff up in the yellow pages.

Yeah, there was a poll that found, I think in 2024, more than 50 million homes in the US still have a landline.

“That means that unless they go to the trouble of opting out, they still get a phone book delivered to them every year.”

And that 10% of all Americans still use yellow pages. If you just zero in on 55 and older, almost three quarters of them use the yellow pages to find business like old habits die hard. So if you're, your father-in-laws, like he has an incentive to still, sure, advertising the yellow pages, which means there's an incentive for yellow pages to still exist.

As long as people use them, you know?

Yeah, what I'm really mad about is I'm now in the age group or they're like, but this is what the olds are doing. Oh, yeah, yeah, for again, yellow pages. Just come on. I get that. Nobody I know my age looks in the yellow pages, so I take issue with that number.

You're a 26%er. Yeah, I guess so. But I have to say, if you're looking for auto glass repair in the Cowgafalls, Ohio region, and you want to avoid big auto glass, go with the mom and father. In this case, the pop and go check out Senaco Glass, tell Rick we sent you.

Very nice, man. They do great work. I can't think of any better way for short stuff to be out. That's right, we're out.

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