{"id":33352,"date":"2024-07-25T18:13:53","date_gmt":"2024-07-25T22:13:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/?p=33352"},"modified":"2024-07-26T21:49:19","modified_gmt":"2024-07-27T01:49:19","slug":"when-our-fingers-did-the-walking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/2024\/07\/when-our-fingers-did-the-walking\/","title":{"rendered":"When Our Fingers Did the Walking"},"content":{"rendered":"

From what I was told and what little I remember, I learned how to read via a combination of Golden Books<\/a>, our family’s 1957 World Book Encyclopedia<\/a>, a dark-blue Second Edition of the Merriam-Webster New Collegiate Dictionary<\/a> and, perhaps most accessibly, our local Bell Telephone directories<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Back in the day, the phone book — and its Yellow Pages\u2122 in particular — was more than the precursor to a yet-to-be-imagined internet.\u00a0 It was an annually-updated document of 20<\/span>th-century Western Pennsylvania commercial and cultural life, which I found both educational and artistic in a retro kind of way.\u00a0 Our town was 15 years behind the times, and it was reflected in our phone books.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 I’ll follow these slides with some historical context and a few “where are they now” notes.<\/p>\n

USE ARROWS, ARROW KEYS OR DOTS TO NAVIGATE<\/span><\/h4>\n