The White Pages are no more.

They have come to a "quiet end" according to the little item in this morning's paper. The company responsible seems to think that it is still possible to get a residential number by calling Directory Assistance.

They have missed the point completely. The white pages were far more than "just phone numbers". They were the address book for many, a very large address book for the entire state.

I can still remember the first phone number I ever had to use. It is the number which was held by my paternal grandparents. The phone itself, a black Bakelite phone of pre-war vintage. By no means everyone had a house phone even when I was born but Grandpa had one because he was a man of business. Grandma almost never used the phone. She was not one for "just chatting". I was taught to recite the number very early in my life. If anything went wrong and I was alone then I was to ask people to call that number if there was no policeman around. I never had to do that but I did need to call my grandparents occasionally. I wonder how many children now know the numbers for their grandparents' mobile phones?

We had a phone too. Teachers were expected to have them but they were not used by parents to contact teachers except in extreme emergencies. In one remote place the school phone was in the classroom. It rarely rang. I remember one occasion when the "post master", who also owned the tiny general store, phoned to say there was a fire on a property and the "four big boys" were needed to help. Someone came to get them a little later. The rest of us thought they were "lucky to get out of school"! 

It was expensive, very expensive, to make long distance calls at that time. They were limited to three minutes and they had to be booked in advance. I suspect the Senior Cat, the bank manager and the policeman were the only people who made more than one a year and they made them only rarely. There was also something called a "party line", a line shared by more than one house. These lines had their drawbacks. Anyone could listen in on a conversation. If you did not want others to know your business you kept your mouth shut until you could have a genuinely private conversation. On the other hand they had their uses. It often meant people knew where someone else was and "Oh, so and so is at...." could save wasted journeys and allow bales of hay to be picked up or children to be taken care of in emergencies. On one occasion the doctor was called to an accident because someone had seen his car somewhere and it was a "fairly simple" matter of waving him down on his way back! 

No, there was no real need for a phone book if you had to go through the tiny local switchboard but the phone book for everywhere else was guarded. It sat on shelves out of reach. The old books were used  for toiletry purposes but the new ones were vital because they had addresses as well as names and phone numbers. People still wrote letters.

Now it is not possible to find an address in that way. It is not possible to tell if someone may have moved or whether you might be talking to the right person. If you want a number from Directory Assistance it is assumed you already know the address. There can be no vague, "I'd recognise the house and it is somewhere along...."

As it is also much more difficult to access the Electoral Roll now the demise of the White Pages is going to make it much harder to find people. Does it matter? It might. We will not be able to search for old friends and casual acquaintances. If we do not want some others to know where we live it may be a little easier to keep it from then. It has the potential to make some people even more isolated.

Somehow though it has not stopped those calls nobody seems to want.... those "marketing" calls.