From what I was told and what little I remember, I learned how to read via a combination of Golden Books, our family’s 1957 World Book Encyclopedia, a dark-blue Second Edition of the Merriam-Webster New Collegiate Dictionary and, perhaps most accessibly, our local Bell Telephone directories.
Back in the day, the phone book — and its Yellow Pages™ in particular — was more than the precursor to a yet-to-be-imagined internet. It was an annually-updated document of 20th-century Western Pennsylvania commercial and cultural life, which I found both educational and artistic in a retro kind of way. Our town was 15 years behind the times, and it was reflected in our phone books.
I thought I would share assorted well-loved-and-remembered excerpts from our 1958 and 1959 phone books, which I retrieved from The Library of Congress. I’ll follow these slides with some historical context and a few “where are they now” notes.
USE ARROWS, ARROW KEYS OR DOTS TO NAVIGATE
☎ HOW TO USE YOUR TELEPHONE: I didn’t know until researching this piece that the first phone number at my parents’ house (1947) was 2385-R. Numbers like this could not be reached without operator intervention.
Telephone operators (my mother had been one) would be replaced, one exchange after the next, by automated switching gear. The U.S. operator workforce, predominately women, declined by nearly a third in the 1950s. Many of them got better jobs than what they had.
In 1953, soon after I was born, phone customers in our city were assigned new numbers; ours was OL 2-2309. OL stood for Oliver, the phone company’s alphabetic prefix for our 65 exchange. Oliver sounded pretty lame to me, even at age seven. But the Oliver prefix was probably better for business than, say, Oligarch or Oldfart.
The 1953 directory included phone dialing instructions (as seen in the slide) to ensure customers did not confuse the letters I and O with the “figures” 1 and 0. This kind of hand-holding would be laughed at today — even though smartphones need more of it.
• • •
Conveniently, I didn’t need to dial that OL prefix to call my friends or when my friend Bill and I made and recorded prank calls, asking random people to spell rhinoceros and other such hilarities. I still can’t believe that all of our “targets” were willing to spell rhinoceros on demand when some pre-teen caller represented himself as a student with a important school project and could hardly suppress his giggles.
Bill and I had hours upon hours of laughs replaying our tape recording of townspeople misspelling rhinoceros. My belated thank you, random long-departed townspeople, for brightening our boring small-town days.
If I recall, it wasn’t until the early 1970s that New Castle customers were finally forced to dial seven numbers, including the OL prefix, to make local calls. By that time, Bill and I had long ago ended our tape-recorded reign of telephone terror and moved on to girls.
☎ TELEPHONE STYLES: Our house had four (!) phones: kitchen, parents’ bedroom, sister’s bedroom, basement. They were all bulky plastic affairs, and the basement set was a almond-painted white wall-phone that spent most of its life shedding its artificial skin. All of them were rented from the phone company and were paid for many times over.
☎ RASHID RUG CLEANERS: The Neshannock Avenue address in the Yellow Pages ad is now a grassy lot in an urban-renewal nowhere. Rashid relocated his rug business to East Washington St., two doors down from the church my parents attended; he closed up shop in 2022.
☎ COAL: The former Boyles Coal & Supplies building is now boarded up and lifeless. There appears to be one coal dealer left in the county, Gilliland Hauling.
☎ DeGIORGI BEAUTY SALON: This address is now a parking lot, one of the dozens in New Castle that exist not to provide much-needed parking spaces but because there is no economic rationale to build a new building there. This site was also home to the popular Jimmy’s Sandwich Shop where, as a delivery person for my uncle’s florist business, I ate delicious meatloaf-and-gravy-on-white-bread sandwiches on our paid lunch breaks.
☎ PASCARELLA’S SERVICE CENTER: This site is now a Country Fair gas station with no evidence of either service or frozen custard.
☎ JAMESON ICE CREAM: The building that housed the Jameson candy and ice cream business on North Croton Ave. still exists, but I can’t tell if any businesses occupy it today. Jameson relocated several times and finally closed in May 2024.
☎ LINGER LIGHT DAIRY: This once-popular dairy’s Mahoningtown location is now an empty lot as well. I took a photo of the Linger Light building before it was demolished, which I will share sometime in a future ART @ CHC gallery.
Linger Light delivered milk to our doorstep for years, well into the 1960s I believe. I was always disappointed that my mom never ordered chocolate milk as a treat once in a while.
By the way, the Linger Light mascot was named “Tiny Tawker” and was the creation of illustrator Andrew Loomis, 1892-1959. The elf appeared in promotional calendars and advertisements for various businesses in the 1950s.
☎ CITY APPLIANCE: I loved Yellow Pages ads which had anthropomorphic machines, especially machines in discomfort. The sick fridge in this ad was a yearly favorite of mine. Hope it got repainted before it died.
The City Appliance repair shop site is now a patch of broken-up pavement in front of an empty factory, which is for sale if you’re interested.
☎ TV AND WASHER REPAIR: You gotta love the illustrations in these ads, straight out of the post-war era when people figured that guys with determination could fix anything.
The ADKO Television Service address is now home to a home daycare. The Alco Washer site on West Washington Street is a dilapidated building annex most recently occupied by Preach Jesus Ministries. The ministry, by ungodly coincidence, has moved to a location a few doors down from the one-time home of ADKO Television Service.
☎ LAUNDRY AND DRY CLEANING: The site of Gertie and Bill’s Launderette is now a vacant lot. The One-Hour Martinizing shop in the heart of downtown New Castle looks to be an empty shell.
One-Hour Martinizing is a decades-old franchise based on non-flammable dry-cleaning solvent, which allowed items to be cleaned on-site. In the mid-1970s, there were 5000 One-Hour Martinizing franchisees — today there are about 300 U.S. and international locations and New Castle isn’t one.
As to Humphrey’s Dry Cleaning: they renamed themselves Connerly’s Cleaning, which my mom used all her life — they picked up and delivered to your home. I always thought Mr. Connerly looked a bit like Floyd on the Andy Griffith Show. The business survives to this day in its original location, an anomaly.
☎ VILLANOVA INN: This ad is more personal for me. Our family went to the Villanova for dinner many Sundays when I was a kid. I recall how the restaurant was divided down the middle, with the booths and tables on the right, where we would sit, and the more-fun (so I imagined) bar section on the other side of the wall to the left. The red fake-leather booths had jukebox selectors with glowing letter and number keys that beckoned one to press them no matter what song got played.
What I didn’t know until much later was that the restaurant was owned and operated by the parents of the “actor” in our little offbeat high-school clique, Lester Malizia. That is also when I discovered that the Villanova had the best pizza in town, this in a town with almost as many Italian restaurants — and styles of pizza — as there were churches that began with the word “Saint.”
I think the last time I was in the Villanova, other than maybe picking up a pizza, was for my impromptu bachelor send-off 5o years ago, when I gathered with my college friends over a beer for the last time. I’m not sure when the Villanova changed hands, but I know the restaurant was renamed at least once. It appears that the building is still standing but now empty save for its upstairs apartments.
☎ KLINE LUMBER: Kline Lumber’s Yellow Pages mascot, whom I shall retroactively name Woody K. Plank, embedded itself in my memory, appearing in the phone book each and every year as long as I recall. Woody was a non-ironic R. Crumb-style character, selling assorted building products with his strange, wistful grin. To me, Woody looks like he is saying, “I’m old and weak, my back is bent, but I’m still alive — I will now step aside and endorse Kamala Plywood.”
The Kline Lumber and Construction Company was incorporated in 1901. The S. Beaver Street location of Kline Lumber was abandoned in the late 1960s, to be replaced by the new Towne Mall, anchored by G. C. Murphy. I have not been able to determine when Woody boarded up the Kline Lumber doors for good.
Wood products, like the billions of Yellow Pages that were once made from it, don’t last forever, nor do our memories. Please feel free to share your own phone-book nostalgia.
Not that my voice will add to any movement, such as it is, but Joe Biden’s abject failure on the debate stage ten days ago to show he is in command of his faculties, well… that’s that.
If I had the kind of “bad day” that Biden did at the debate, I would hope that my spouse and children would be on the phone figuring out how to get me the best help.
More than anything, I find it sad that it is taking Democrats well-past-forever to mount the “groundswell of good wishes” that would convince Joe to forego his campaign and let his party see where the dice may fall without him.
Joe should have known better not to run for a second term in the first place, and he had originally promised not to do so. I hope the forces now stirring will ultimately prevail and give America its best chance to keep Trump from re-claiming his gold-plated throne.