Did you get your new phone book? All across the Twin Cities this weekend, phone books were dumped off on unsuspecting customers, landing slumped against the door like a sack of potatoes. Here’s forty pounds of unsolicited pulp, pal, and it just made the other 40 pounds we gave you obsolete. You’re welcome. Alas, this series has the same lack of narrative drive that characterized the last installment; characters are introduced and abandoned before they’re really developed. The 15-page mob scene of Andersons is amusing at first, but after a while it’s like one of those “Family Guy” jokes that wears out its welcome. All in all, a disappointment, and I think this series is showing its age. Wait for the DVD.
The delivery contained four books. Four. The White and Yellow pages are called “Dex,” but no one calls them that, despite Qwest’s best efforts. Not even the guy who came up with the term "Dex" calls it "Dex." The shipment also included the small, Reader’s Digest version called “Dex Plus” - plus what? Vitamins? Aloe Lotion? – and there’s a smaller regional phone book, which I have used once, to crush a bug. All in all, a sizeable portion of a sizeable tree, wasted. Out go the old books, rarely used; in come the new ones doomed to the same fate. Thanks, but no.
When I was a kid in a smaller town, the new phone book was a source of great interest: who was first? Ah, Aaron Andersen is walking around town a proud man today; he’s first. (At least until his nemesis, Aaron Anderson, pushes him in front of a bus. And even then he’d have to wait a year.) The last entry was always someone like Zeke Zlycliff, an 86-year old fellow who’d required the book’s makers to have a “Z” section for the last 30 years; when he left this earth, the phone book would end in Y, which seemed oddly anticlimactic, shave-and-a-haircut without the two-bits.
In Minneapolis in the 80s, the phone book ended with a blind man who lived downtown, made tape recordings of his thoughts, and played them on the “Zzzyzzerific Funline,” which you could call day or night. This was podcasting way before its time. The front of the White Pages belonged to places like AAAAA-A Auto Glass, or AAAAAAAA Tongue Depressors, or AAAAAAAAAAAAA-AA Parachute School.
Have they changed much over the years? Well, the StarTrib, as you might expect, has a vast selection of historical phonebooks in the morgue. I have here before me the 1952 City Directory, which was a super-phone book handed out to libraries, police stations, newspapers, and other Authorities. The first entry: “A A Battery Co (Nathan Zeldes.)” You had your alpha and omega, right there. I went to the back of the book to see if Nathan ended the book as well, but that honor went to Mrs. Zyzuk. Zoya Zyzuk, just to make the point clear. You wonder if she was secretly proud of her position, or dreaded the crank calls the listing no doubt produced. Why those people cared so much about why her fridge was running, she'd never know.
How did I know she was married? That’s what her entry said, along with her profession. (She was a “marker,” whatever that was.) The old phone books told everyone what you did for your bread. Teacher. Chicken Cleaner. Car Runner. Knitter. Greaser. Something called “Mtceman,” which may be maintenance man. Machinist. Musician. Spotsman. Pullman Porter. Those were the days when jobs came in two-syllable sizes, and it seemed as if nearly everyone had a job using their hands to make something. There are 21 pages of Andersons – six more than today - but inclusion of their professions makes them all pop off the page, individuals each. (The last one, incidentally, was Z. Alban Anderson. He was a Plmbr.)
Without that information, today’s phone books just look like entries in a spreadsheet, data to be crunched and mined. Then again, it’s probably a good thing they don’t list people’s professions. If you came across a listing that said Bob L. Pitphaff was an “information distribution creation-tool management analyst,” you’d want to call him up and ask just what the devil he does for a living.
Hey!
I like those "Family Guy" jokes.