Yesterday Paula brought up phonebooks on her blog and the ridiculous amount of paper that is wasted on just such items (see, 300,000 Numbers in Quadruplicate).
This put my wacky mind to work and caused me to remember a couple of phonebook instances that I thought I'd share....
Do any of you remember the episode of "Friends" where Phoebe's Grandmother is "updating" her phonebook by going through the Obituaries and marking the names out of the White Pages? And this is my only reference to pop culture in today's blog.
My grandparents used to keep their local phonebooks for years and years. There were a couple of reasons for this. But first you must understand that my grandparents, both sets, live(d) in small towns in the Mid-West and their phonebooks were a combined white and yellow pages and probably no more than 3/4 of an inch thick. The phonebooks were a reference tool, and not just to look up some body's phone number. The "adults" (up until just a couple of years ago, I was still considered one of the 'kids'...I guess when one of my cousins became a grandparent, that moved us all into the adult category) would sit around the kitchen table and play Scrabble and talk about friends, events, and the good ol' days. Every now and then a point would need to be clarified, and typically it was based on events of when and where they happened. The conversation would go along the lines of "It was when so-and-so lived over on Baker Street..." In order to clarify this, the phonebooks would come out. There would be rifling through the books to first find so-and-so and then to determine what their address was.
Similar conversations would occur at my other grandparents' house as well, but Scrabble wasn't involved.
With the dawn of the Internet, that is no longer possible. I don't even know if they still publish the white/yellow pages in Smalltown, USA anymore. Its funny how looking back on my youth makes me wish for that simpler time. And, now I'm getting all weepy and sentimental.....
5 comments:
My in-laws live in smalltown, USA...actually, they live between small towns USA..hahaha
I get a chuckle everytime I see their phone book. Practically the entire county is put into one phone book, and even with yellow pages, it is the exact same size as a regular edition of Reader's Digest.
Oh-h-h-h-h!!! That is so sweet of you to remember. MIT
I totally remember that Friends episode.
OMG, that is funny about how they would use the phonebooks as reference. I love that! It reminds me somewhat of dinner before my recent hs reunion, when we'd whip out the yearbook to show pictures of the people we were telling stories about. ah, memories
I too remember that Friends episode. Too funny. And by the way, if you are Scrabble fan, let's start a game on Facebook. it's my fave!
My family still lives in Smalltown, USA, and let me assure you, they do still have a phone book, but it's about 1/2 inch thick for the whole area.
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