Do you like phone books?

[abefroman329]

It was not unusual back in the day for people who lived in larger metro areas to use phone books as booster seats for kids at the kitchen or dining room table.  I remember in college once making a joke about that, and the person who I was talking to didn't get it.  Turned out they were from a small town where the phone book was less than 1/2 inch thick.

The only thing I miss about phone books is that, eventually, I'm going to say that I could listen to [insert actor here] read from the Yellow Pages for two hours and be entertained, and the person I'm talking to won't know what the Yellow Pages are/were.

I don't know if I miss them or not, but I don't really miss having to call several business to get the info I can now get on the Internet.

[SP Cook]

Phone books, like the paper TV Guide, exist only as pale imitations of what they once were.  At one time a phone book was a necessary household item and the ads in the yellow pages were very important to almost any type of business. 

I have seen county record rooms that keep a large collection of old phone books, and a similar publication that was called the Business Directory.  When one gets stuck on land records, they can be a way to get unstuck.

[hbelkins]

Navin Johnson sure liked the phone book.

So did the guy who picked his name out of the phone book as the person to shoot at.

Well, if it happened in a comedic movie, it must have been a risk to all of us.

That guy couldn't shoot worth a darn.

In an ironic turn of fate, "The Jerk" was on TV this afternoon. I hadn't seen it in awhile.

Like many Gen-Xers, I was surprised to learn that the dog was actually named Shithead and not Stupid, since, until I was probably in my early 20s, I'd only seen the edited-for-television version.

Anyway, the guy wasn't trying to shoot Navin, he just really hated cans of motor oil.  Or were the cans defective?

The version I saw Saturday actually called him "Iron Balls McGinty" instead of "Iron Bill," which I'd always heard previously on the TV edit.

Wonder how someone who's only seen "Blazing Saddles" on TV would react to the original version?

[wxfree]

This is similar to a topic I've thought about starting here:  What is the latest telephone directory you have/got?  My newest one is from 2016.  I kept them for years and then recycled them by the pile.  I still have about 10, dating back to 2011.  I generally got two each year, during the last block of years, I got "yellowbook" and "yp," with no capital letters.  The yp put the white pages where they belong, in front.  I hate advertising, but the yellow pages are the only place where I ever appreciated ads.  They can make it easier to find what I'm looking for and give helpful information such as hours or additional telephone numbers.

I can't say that I really liked them.  They were just utilitarian.  My aunt lived in a small city and her directory had reverse lookup.  Each of the two prefixes had its own section, and the last four digits were listed in numerical order and showed the listing.  I always that that was cool.  My directories never had that.

Speaking of old stuff you still like, I love newspapers.  I have print subscriptions to two.  One publishes three times each week and I get all of them. The other prints six times each week and I just get Sunday, but I read it online every day (including Sunday because there's additional content in the online edition and the online-only edition on Saturday).  I'm surprised by how much I enjoy reading the newspaper online.  I don't usually like new things.  It's made up to look like the printed product, but it's much easier to hold, either on a phone screen or the computer monitor.  I love having a few physical papers each week to go through, although two every day like I got 25 years ago would be too much clutter.  I absolutely love the balance today, with four newspapers each week plus reading the online edition of one of them every day.

I'm also a big fan of photo prints that can hang on the wall and don't need a screen to be seen.  The cell phone camera everyone has today is much better than the crappy 35 mm cameras we old people had back in our day.  Back then the 8 by 10 print was the domain of professionals, while today it's the domain of anyone who cares to try.

[abefroman329]

Wonder how someone who's only seen "Blazing Saddles" on TV would react to the original version?

I saw the TV version about five years before the original version. The biggest change, of course, was the removal of the fart sounds from the campfire scene. Other than that, it was really more about what they added to the TV version to pad it out to a run time of two hours minus commercials. Several additional traps to try and capture Mongo, and...something that took place after they arrived at the tollbooth for the Le Petomaine Thruway, but before they arrived at the fake Rock Ridge?

[Scott5114]

the tollbooth for the Le Petomaine Thruway

I'm a little surprised people don't make references to this on this forum more often. I had to go look it up (I'm familiar with Blazing Saddles since it's one of my parents' favorite movies, but they never let me actually watch it with them). At some point I should really watch the whole thing.

[abefroman329]

You definitely should, I think you'd like it a lot.

[SP Cook]

This is similar to a topic I've thought about starting here:  What is the latest telephone directory you have/got? 

When the government broke up AT&T (one of the dumbest things ever done, but a topic for another day) one of the consequences was that anybody could publish a phone book, and a place went from the one and only one "official" phone book from the "real" phone company, to as many as 8 or 10.  This has mostly died out, since the scam was to call up business and sell them ads pretending to be the actual phone company. 

Anyway, I have an "official" phone book from my local POTS "real" phone company (Frontier) dated 2/21.  The landlord got a whole bundle of them and set them by the stairwell and I was the only one to take one.  They set there for months until somebody just decided to throw the rest away.  I'm sure Frontier published one for 22, but my landlord probably got a clue and just tossed them when they showed up at his office.

[Dirt Roads]

Our local phone company (which was CenturyLink until recently) began placing extra phone books in the local post offices about 12 years ago or so.  This allowed us to get the one for our exchange in the mail and pick up one for the adjacent exchange in their post office.  The phone books for both Hillsborough and Mebane were the smaller half-page versions.

We've been thrown a curve-ball here, as Orange County no longer recycles phone books (and other similarly bound documents).  They do recycle "mixed paper" so I can (and do) take the time to rip the pages from the binders (and I throw out the binder edge, although we've not been officially told that the binder edge doesn't belong in the single stream recycling).  It ain't fun, and I am usually months behind in this new recycling game where you can recycle but you have to take more time to process before it goes into machine.

[Rothman]

This is similar to a topic I've thought about starting here:  What is the latest telephone directory you have/got? 

When the government broke up AT&T (one of the dumbest things ever done, but a topic for another day) one of the consequences was that anybody could publish a phone book, and a place went from the one and only one "official" phone book from the "real" phone company, to as many as 8 or 10.  This has mostly died out, since the scam was to call up business and sell them ads pretending to be the actual phone company. 

Anyway, I have an "official" phone book from my local POTS "real" phone company (Frontier) dated 2/21.  The landlord got a whole bundle of them and set them by the stairwell and I was the only one to take one.  They set there for months until somebody just decided to throw the rest away.  I'm sure Frontier published one for 22, but my landlord probably got a clue and just tossed them when they showed up at his office.

My mother still bemoans the breakup of Bell, Inc.  She liked the convenience of just calling "the phone company."

[abefroman329]

This is similar to a topic I've thought about starting here:  What is the latest telephone directory you have/got? 

When the government broke up AT&T (one of the dumbest things ever done, but a topic for another day) one of the consequences was that anybody could publish a phone book, and a place went from the one and only one "official" phone book from the "real" phone company, to as many as 8 or 10.  This has mostly died out, since the scam was to call up business and sell them ads pretending to be the actual phone company. 

Anyway, I have an "official" phone book from my local POTS "real" phone company (Frontier) dated 2/21.  The landlord got a whole bundle of them and set them by the stairwell and I was the only one to take one.  They set there for months until somebody just decided to throw the rest away.  I'm sure Frontier published one for 22, but my landlord probably got a clue and just tossed them when they showed up at his office.

My mother still bemoans the breakup of Bell, Inc.  She liked the convenience of just calling "the phone company."

So does my dad, but he, my mom, and my mom's mom all worked for Bell/AT&T/Lucent Technologies/Alcatel Lucent/whatever it is now, and both my dad and my grandmother retired from there.

[hbelkins]

the tollbooth for the Le Petomaine Thruway

I'm a little surprised people don't make references to this on this forum more often. I had to go look it up (I'm familiar with Blazing Saddles since it's one of my parents' favorite movies, but they never let me actually watch it with them). At some point I should really watch the whole thing.

I make references to it quite often, not just here.

This is similar to a topic I've thought about starting here:  What is the latest telephone directory you have/got? 

When the government broke up AT&T (one of the dumbest things ever done, but a topic for another day) one of the consequences was that anybody could publish a phone book, and a place went from the one and only one "official" phone book from the "real" phone company, to as many as 8 or 10.  This has mostly died out, since the scam was to call up business and sell them ads pretending to be the actual phone company. 

Anyway, I have an "official" phone book from my local POTS "real" phone company (Frontier) dated 2/21.  The landlord got a whole bundle of them and set them by the stairwell and I was the only one to take one.  They set there for months until somebody just decided to throw the rest away.  I'm sure Frontier published one for 22, but my landlord probably got a clue and just tossed them when they showed up at his office.

It used to be a common complaint in Winchester, where I lived 1995-2002, for the third-party phone book printers to just go around putting the phone books on driveways or doorsteps instead of mailing them. We always got the official phone book in the mail.

Didn't phone companies start putting fake listings in their publications for copyright traps the way map makers do sometime? I guess the phone company equivalent of Goblu or Beatosu would be someone named Jenny with a number of 867-5309.

[GaryV]

In college I was in a choir that toured at spring break. One time we stayed in such a small town that they didn't have a phone book. They had a phone card. About the size of 1/2 an 8.5x14 piece of index stock.

[bandit957]

Ours were hand-delivered, not mailed. There was one year (1998, I think) where I was paid to deliver them around Highland Heights.

[skluth]

This is similar to a topic I've thought about starting here:  What is the latest telephone directory you have/got? 

When the government broke up AT&T (one of the dumbest things ever done, but a topic for another day) one of the consequences was that anybody could publish a phone book, and a place went from the one and only one "official" phone book from the "real" phone company, to as many as 8 or 10.  This has mostly died out, since the scam was to call up business and sell them ads pretending to be the actual phone company. 

Anyway, I have an "official" phone book from my local POTS "real" phone company (Frontier) dated 2/21.  The landlord got a whole bundle of them and set them by the stairwell and I was the only one to take one.  They set there for months until somebody just decided to throw the rest away.  I'm sure Frontier published one for 22, but my landlord probably got a clue and just tossed them when they showed up at his office.

My mother still bemoans the breakup of Bell, Inc.  She liked the convenience of just calling "the phone company."

If Ma Bell hadn't been broken up, they'd have monopolized the cell business and we wouldn't have the innovation we see today (or the leaders would be in other countries). Long distance calls would still cost too much unless you had one of those devices Jobs and Wozniak sold to call free all over the world. On the bright side, we'd probably still have phone booths everywhere and only half of them would be operable. Those who fondly remember the old phone company forget just how much it was reviled in its day. Lily Tomlin's Ernestine was almost perfect in how she skewered phone company policies and attitudes, especially her routine where she said something like "We're the phone company. We don't care. We screw everybody."

[bandit957]

Someone told me that Cincinnati Bell was something like one of only two phone companies that the AT&T breakup didn't apply to.

And trust me, it showed.

[Rothman]

And, without the breakup of Bell, we wouldn't have had the classic NYNEX "If it's out there, it's in here" dumbwaiter commercial.

https://youtu.be/71KeSflnyEA

[SP Cook]

Someone told me that Cincinnati Bell was something like one of only two phone companies that the AT&T breakup didn't apply to.

Correct, if you mean the Bell companies.  AT&T owned all of what became the "regional Bell companies" outright.  These covered about 80% or so of the country.  The rest was in the hands of other companies, the largest being GTE, but there were maybe 10 others large enough to be significant.  Mostly, but not exclusively, the "not Bell" areas were places that were still rural or which were rural when telephone service found its way there.    Lexington KY was GTE as were lots of parts of Florida, including IIRC much of Tampa Bay.  Everyplace in Virginia west of about I-77 was United Telephone. 

Then there were the two exceptions.  Cincinnati Bell, which had exchanges in Ohio, Kentucky, and IIRC, maybe just inside Indiana; and Southern New England Telephone, which had most of Connecticut, which AT&T only owned a minority share in.  They were left to figure it out themselves.

The breakup of AT&T, which BTW had nothing to do with cell phones or any other technology that was invented or popularized after 1982, was one of the greatest public policy mistakes of all time.  If I live in Georgia and my one and only no choice phone company used to be AT&T Southern Bell but is now "Bell South" and some other person I don't know lives in Pennsylvania and his one and only no choice phone company used to be AT&T Bell of Pennsylvania but is now "Bell Atlantic" this made a difference exactly how?  I'm sure we also had different electric companies, gas companies, cable companies, etc.  But only one each.  It served no purpose, except to destroy what was the most widely held stock in the entire world and eliminate the good union jobs at Western Electric and move them overseas.

[Dirt Roads]

The breakup of AT&T, which BTW had nothing to do with cell phones or any other technology that was invented or popularized after 1982, was one of the greatest public policy mistakes of all time.  If I live in Georgia and my one and only no choice phone company used to be AT&T Southern Bell but is now "Bell South" and some other person I don't know lives in Pennsylvania and his one and only no choice phone company used to be AT&T Bell of Pennsylvania but is now "Bell Atlantic" this made a difference exactly how?  I'm sure we also had different electric companies, gas companies, cable companies, etc.  But only one each.  It served no purpose, except to destroy what was the most widely held stock in the entire world and eliminate the good union jobs at Western Electric and move them overseas.

Your thoughts are valid for most folks (back in those days) who mostly utilized local services and made very few long distance calls.  But what if you needed one of these?

[SP Cook]

Your thoughts are valid for most folks (back in those days) who mostly utilized local services and made very few long distance calls.  But what if you needed one of these?

Well, and I think my rightist credentials are pretty solid on this board, considering the grossly unfair things some handful of posters have falsely accused me of, but, yes.  The phone companies, both AT&T and the others (which got paid by AT&T a fee when people called long distance) LOST money on local calls, and MADE money on long distance calls.  And, at the gross broad level, more long distance calls were made by businesses and more affluent people, and less by poor people.

In other words, the most widely held stock in the world, soaked businesses and the rich to provide universal service to the poor. 

[zzcarp]

And now, thanks to deregulation and technological advances, there's basically no long distance charges anymore. Nor do you have to rent a telephone from the phone company.

[skluth]

And now, thanks to deregulation and technological advances, there's basically no long distance charges anymore. Nor do you have to rent a telephone from the phone company.

Phone rentals had stopped being required before the Bell breakup. My apartment in 1980 had a giant Mickey Mouse phone because my roommate bought it after she snorted a bunch of coke.

[Dirt Roads]

Your thoughts are valid for most folks (back in those days) who mostly utilized local services and made very few long distance calls.  But what if you needed one of these?

Well, and I think my rightist credentials are pretty solid on this board, considering the grossly unfair things some handful of posters have falsely accused me of, but, yes.  The phone companies, both AT&T and the others (which got paid by AT&T a fee when people called long distance) LOST money on local calls, and MADE money on long distance calls.  And, at the gross broad level, more long distance calls were made by businesses and more affluent people, and less by poor people.

In other words, the most widely held stock in the world, soaked businesses and the rich to provide universal service to the poor.

That's a good point, but does nothing to support your argument (which I don't particularly agree or disagree with).  So let me mess things up worse:

     A.  Almost everybody that uses a landline is still stuck with a monopolized utility service, including those of use that have a Mom-and-Pop phone company.  (Basic gist of your original comment).

     B.  After the breakup of Ma Bell, we can now make lots of long distance phone calls from a landline at a low cost.  Most of us have a bundled service at a reasonable monthly fee.

     C.  At one point, the cost of (800) phone services got low enough that I could actually save money by adding an (877) overlay number to my landline so that I could easily retrieve voicemail on my answering machine.

     D.  The rest of society (cell phone users, businesses and government) still pay the "lions share" of the cost of telephone infrastructure.

     E.  In a few short years, my local Mom-and-Pop phone company got big enough to purchase a large regional phone company, who in turn, got big enough to purchase one of the struggling Baby Bells (QWest).  That just broke up, by the way.

Depending on how you look at it, there have been a bunch of changes that wouldn't have happened without the breakup of Ma Bell.  For the record, a very close relative was the architect of the Ma Bell breakup on the data computing side.  She started out working on the very first computer ever installed in West Virginia, and worked her way up to being the genius of the entire phone system computer network in the Southeast.  After the breakup, she got bounced back-and-forth between a couple of the Baby Bells.  One of those bounces was with Bell Labs, but her background (and others like her) wasn't a good fit for the innovation giant, so she ended up back on the operations side (not sure if this was before/during/after the breakup).

I don't know how she felt about the breakup, and really should ask her.

[Big John]

The breakup of AT&T, which BTW had nothing to do with cell phones or any other technology that was invented or popularized after 1982, was one of the greatest public policy mistakes of all time.  If I live in Georgia and my one and only no choice phone company used to be AT&T Southern Bell but is now "Bell South" and some other person I don't know lives in Pennsylvania and his one and only no choice phone company used to be AT&T Bell of Pennsylvania but is now "Bell Atlantic" this made a difference exactly how?  I'm sure we also had different electric companies, gas companies, cable companies, etc.  But only one each.  It served no purpose, except to destroy what was the most widely held stock in the entire world and eliminate the good union jobs at Western Electric and move them overseas.

Your thoughts are valid for most folks (back in those days) who mostly utilized local services and made very few long distance calls.  But what if you needed one of these?

Note that it said interstate calls.  For some reason in-state long distance calls were more expensive.

[Dirt Roads]

Your thoughts are valid for most folks (back in those days) who mostly utilized local services and made very few long distance calls.  But what if you needed one of these?

Well, and I think my rightist credentials are pretty solid on this board, considering the grossly unfair things some handful of posters have falsely accused me of, but, yes.  The phone companies, both AT&T and the others (which got paid by AT&T a fee when people called long distance) LOST money on local calls, and MADE money on long distance calls.  And, at the gross broad level, more long distance calls were made by businesses and more affluent people, and less by poor people.

In other words, the most widely held stock in the world, soaked businesses and the rich to provide universal service to the poor.

<snipped>

Depending on how you look at it, there have been a bunch of changes that wouldn't have happened without the breakup of Ma Bell.  For the record, a very close relative was the architect of the Ma Bell breakup on the data computing side.  She started out working on the very first computer ever installed in West Virginia, and worked her way up to being the genius of the entire phone system computer network in the Southeast.  After the breakup, she got bounced back-and-forth between a couple of the Baby Bells.  One of those bounces was with Bell Labs, but her background (and others like her) wasn't a good fit for the innovation giant, so she ended up back on the operations side (not sure if this was before/during/after the breakup).

I don't know how she felt about the breakup, and really should ask her.

Just an update.  I talked to her yesterday and she said two things:  (1) she didn't like that AT&T was split up; and (2) after the split, she didn't like that the "Baby Bells got back together again".  So I told her the story (once again) about how our Mom-and-Pop phone company got bigger...   She is getting up in years and quite forgetful, but she was quite amazing in her days.  Wished I could have gotten more out of her on this story.