An Icon of the 20th Century

The Yellow Pages

Something that was in over 90% of U.S. households. Something that had fully gone away in my mind. Then I returned from a short vacation, and in all the mail was a new, half-inch-thick yellow pages of my suburban region. Wow! There still is something called “the Yellow Pages”. Then I saw the cover and I laughed. Here is the photo of the part of the cover that provoked the laugh.

The “Original Search Engine”. This description is intended for anyone who did not live in the United States during the 20th century.

As regular readers of this column and my books know, I have said that humanity has entered the Shift Age around 20 years ago and that we would all have two realities>. Our physical reality and our screen reality. Everyone understood this during COVID-19, but just think of how you go through a day. You deal with your physical reality, and then you keep checking your screen reality. We all get most of our data and information from the latter, so things like a big, unwieldy book has no use.

In the 20^th century, up until the Internet/Cellular introduction in the 1990s, all information and entertainment were mostly one-way into the home [TV, radio, print subscriptions]. There usually was a print companion to inbound technology; phone books for the telephone and print guides like TV Guide for television viewing. Who needs print guides when everything is searchable online, in the screen reality?

In the 20^th century, the telephone became ubiquitous. By the end of WWII, some 45% of American households had a landline phone. By the late 1950s, the percentage topped 75%, and by 1970, some 90% of all American households had a landline phone.

So the telephone was a new technology in the 20^th century. Any new technology needs to create users. The television industry had to create programming so that consumers would go out and buy a set. The telephone company, AT&T, until 1982, needed to encourage consumers to make calls, so they provided them with books containing numbers to call, and people did.

There was a white pages book that had all the personal numbers of individuals or families. Then there was the yellow pages, which had all the commercial phone numbers. The white pages were listed alphabetically by last name and the yellow pages were listed alphabetically by category [hardware stores, plumbers, dentists, etc.]. I grew up in Chicago, a big city, so each of our family’s phone books was quite thick. Somewhere between three and four inches thick. The paper used for the phone books was the thinnest paper stock possible.

During my childhood and well into my adult years, every person I knew or was familiar with had at least one of these books. What was usually needed was a small ‘telephone’ table with room for the phone on top and the big two phone books underneath on a shelf. The vast majority of boomers will recall their version of this immediately, and a majority of Gen Xers as well. The Millennial generation was the transition generation, so by the time of Gen Z, born this century, these large legacy books had largely vanished. This was why I was so surprised to get a new, thin version of “the Original Search Engine” called ‘the Real Yellow Pages’

The phone book was an icon for Americans in the second half of the 20^th century well beyond its usage.

-You knew someone was about to move in next door, as the phone company had delivered the white and yellow pages on the doorstep

-Strong men claimed their strength by tearing in two a Yellow Pages book from a big city. It became a cliché, strength conveyed by tearing a thick phone book

-The Yellow Pages were often issued annually, so most households had old phone books. What to do with them? Short people used them as mini-step ladders to reach things on the top shelf. I dare say that the phrase, ‘that’s a door stop’ for a thick, heavy book started with the Yellow Pages.

-I had a great career in media sales, selling first space and then time. I met several people who started out selling the Yellow Pages. It was considered a good training ground for selling.

I am not waxing nostalgically about phone books. I am simply saying that they were a mainstay of America that is largely gone. What we now have in the digital 21^st century are:

-Caller ID

-Spam blocking

-SEO

-views and rankings online

-phones that are portable computers and not just devices for two-way conversations, or, during the last century in companies, if you had the right speaker phone, conference calls

-Digital storage, which is completely portable. An old Yellow Pages would take roughly 1.5 GB of storage. That might add an ounce of weight [?] to your phone.

The Boomers and GenXers have lived through the decades-long transition from analog to digital, big computers to handheld ones, and the early to current stages of the Internet and cellular bandwidth. Every generation after these two in America was born, or came to maturity, with all these things in place.

I have done a largely anecdotal and visual survey of how different generations use their smartphones. Boomers tend to spend more time using their smartphones for phone conversations than younger generations. Gen Z seems to use their phone for phone calls maybe 5-10%. With all the options for email, texting, and social media on the smartphone available, why make a phone call?

Yet, regardless of age, everyone calls their handheld computer a “phone”. Legacy language, as the generations that developed the smartphone, largely Boomers, were, in their minds, working on a mobile, portable phone. The phone company was pushing this as a new revenue stream to their landline business. They clearly did not envision that the mobile business would transform and massively shrink their landline business.

The Yellow Pages were iconic. Now they are a relic, though they seem to be making a slight, thin re-emergence. The move from analog to digital has rendered relics of many things once thought to be irreplaceable.

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