It's a fair question: Since Ma Bell, her successors and assignees have laid down some kind of a mandate over the years about people discarding old telephone directories when they get new ones, why should someone brazenly accumulate over seven decades' worth of these tomes? As the guilty party, I can only paraphrase the response of the mountain climber who was asked why he went to the bother of scaling the Matterhorn: Because they are there.
"There" in this case refers to the room in our house that my wife and I have designated the archives, the kind of place I referred to in an earlier article as an attic. I am aided and abetted in this enterprise by a family friend, Joan Bose, who helps me clip, sort and file and whom I refer to gratefully as St. Joan of Archives. This pack-rat syndrome is a hereditary thing; I trace it to my dad, who, as a longtime newspaperman, tended to save anything he thought he might want to refer to later. He might as well have said "Go and do thou likewise," because I have.
But about those telephone directories. They evoke memories of a kinder, gentler time in communications, a time when only live, human voices were heard over the wire, and when an unlisted number was a rarity if not an impossibility. If you had a phone, you were by gosh in the book. Take, for instance, that wealthy chap who was forever entertaining celebrities in a palatial house on the hillside. There he is in the 1924 directory, "Phelan Jas D. Villa Montalvo ...Saratoga-24." And the crusading editor who took the train every day to his San Francisco newspaper office, "Older Fremont Prospect Rd ... Saratoga-117-W."
Those numbers, incidentally, were enunciated to the operator digit by digit, as explained in the front of the directory. Example: "4418-J - say Four Four (pause) One Eight J."
Without consulting the directory, I can remember our number on Marion Avenue: One Seven R. There were quite a few two-digit numbers, like Phelan's, and even a couple of single-digit numbers.
It was considered quite a coup on somebody's part when Saratoga got dial phones early in 1942; San Jose had to wait until well after the war. While San Joseans were rattling off numbers with the obligatory Ballard or Columbia in front, Saratogans were blithely dialing each other with just four digits.
Last in the dialing lineup was Los Gatos, which had its own telephone company, now part of the GTE communications empire. It was in the late summer of 1950 that they came on line, so to speak. For me, one of the small pleasures in covering Los Gatos Town Council meetings for the San Jose Mercury Herald involved calling in my story at a late hour and getting the night operator at the Los Gatos Telephone Co. Her name escapes me now, but she always recognized my voice, and we used to have friendly chats while she was connecting me with the Central Coast desk at the paper.
An almost ghostly aspect to those old directories is the listing of subscribers in towns that no longer exist. Remember Wrights? It came and went with the railroad line running through the mountains between Los Gatos and Santa Cruz. In the 1925 directory, there were some 75 telephone numbers listed.
If you have any questions about these antediluvian directories, you might try calling Saratoga One Seven R. If an infant answers, hang up.
This article appeared in the Saratoga News, October 2, 1996.
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