By John Estridge
I have an admission to make, and it’s a more than a little embarrassing.
I have found I enjoy reading phone books.
Let me back up here a little bit. After I was fired from my editor’s position at the Brookville Democrat/American and Liberty Herald, I applied at the Brookville Library, and the ladies there hired me. Some days, well most days, I think they may regret that decision as I am a terribly slow learner and tend to forget what I am told one day and try to do the next. That is not entirely true. Sometimes I forget what I was taught about 30 seconds after I was taught it.
Giving someone a new library card, which seems to be one of the main raison d’etre’s of the job, well, if you come up to me for that purpose, put aside a couple of hours of watching me fumble around and probably get it wrong to the point we will be calling you in a few days for more information or one will find I forgot to hit the magic buttons to activate the library card, meaning that person has an inert piece of plastic in their wallet and/or purse.
Back several lifetimes ago, when I was a precision machinist – and sometimes I wonder if that was an alternate universe – the things I did not do everyday even though I worked for Dana more than nine years, I found extremely difficult. An example would be when I was in the Moly Department.
Moly is short for molybdenum. I had to go to Google to explain exactly what Moly is.
“Molybdenum is a silvery-white metal that is ductile and highly resistant to corrosion. It has one of the highest melting points of all pure elements — only the elements tantalum and tungsten have higher melting points. Molybdenum is also a micronutrient essential for life.”
That is from www.livescience.com.
I would put piston rings on an arbor and tighten it down so they were under pressure and put them on a lazy susan-type contraption. At all times, one of the four arbors on the contraption was being sprayed with moly. It was under a lot of heat. It filled up a little channel in the outside diameter of the rings. When the arbor came around for me to take it off the contraption, it was very, very hot. I had a huge asbestos mitt or glove that kept me from horrible burns even though my face may look as if I failed at that part. However, a lot of asbestos dust came from the mitt. Ignorance is sometimes really bliss. The spraying part was in another room, which no one liked entering, but we had to as the moly was in wire form and we had to resupply the wire. It was very, very loud and very, very dusty in there. Ear protection was nonexistent in the factory. It was the 1980s. We were barbaric back then without things like cell phones, GPS or personal computers to name a few things we were without.
I’m sure the large amount of dust was very beneficial to breathing. We had nothing, not even a mask, to wear in that room. One tried to hold his breath while in there, but the spools of wire were very heavy, and they took a while to get set up.
Anyway, after I took the arbor off, I would put the arbor on a lathe-like looking thing and then activate a huge grinding wheel to take the rings on the arbor back to the desired diameter. And that was the rub. When the huge grinding wheel wore out, we had to change it. Or when the ring diameter changed, we had to reset it.
That is where I failed often and when one fails badly with a huge spinning grinding wheel coming at the operator, well it was much scarier and more dangerous than forgetting to activate a library card.
Sometimes, well all the time, my fellow employees would stop what they were doing to watch the results of a new set up or the changing of the wheel because well, cable TV was in its infancy and Netflix was not even a thought so people got entertainment where they could. Also, it was so entertaining for them, they paid for admission. That is because we were on production and got paid by the piece. So, when they shut their machines down to watch, they weren’t getting paid. But watch they did, and they usually got entertained. If watching a guy run screaming like a little girl while a machine is mangled by a huge spinning grinding wheel in front of him is really called entertainment.
Anyway, there is one part of the library job I can do pretty well and that is research for the genealogy and history department. One of the major parts of being a reporter, at least before reporters had agendas of telling us how to think and what to do, was to research a subject. That became much, much easier with the Internet invention. Before that, we had to look in books or back issues of newspapers. My oh my how things change.
Now, I just Google things and find the answers magically appear.
However, that does not always apply for the history and genealogy department. My very knowledgeable and efficient supervisor Julie Schlesselman is patiently teaching me the art of what I call old-school research.
Recently, well right now, I am working on getting a list of all the physicians, dentists and optometrists in Franklin County through its history.
When looking back to the 19th Century, we have several reference books with Reifel’s History being sort of like the Bible or book of magical incantations or both. We also have several volumes of the Indiana History Magazine. Those are tricky. One has to go to an index and then write down possibilities. After that, one pulls the volumes that might contain helpful information, and then one has to be responsible enough not to just sit there and read the entire volume. My nerdy, special self really finds it all very interesting.
As a child, my mother often called me special, which I took as a compliment until I found out one of the meanings of special – I think it was my sister Karen who explained that definition in no uncertain terms. Anyway, I would ask mom a question about something and she either did not have time or patience or something, and she would point to the encyclopedias. I would pull out the correct alphabetical volume and then find what I was looking for. But nine times out of ten or more truthfully ten times out of ten, I would be hours sitting on the floor reading the entire volume or be sent into more volumes with questions stemming from the initial answer. Sometimes, I do believe Karen was correct on that special definition.
Anyway, I hit a roadblock in bridging the time after Reifel to present. I thought I was going to have to pull the microfilm and go through every volume of the paper page by page from the 19-teens to present day, looking for ads and articles. While I can get lost reading articles and ads from back in the day, looking at page after page makes me go cross eyed, and it takes forever.
Thus, Julie gave me a great suggestion, as she always does. Her suggestion was to read our phone books. Remember, phone books? The term “phone books” was in the second paragraph of whatever this is.
We have phone books going back to 1904. Back then, they printed instructions on using the telephone and etiquette while on the phone and how to politely talk to the operators because they are instructed to be courteous to the customers. It really says that in a very condescending way. Also, do not engage the operators in conversation and/or gossip, because they do not have the time, and they have an important job to do. Speak slowly and distinctly to the operator. Use the number and not the name. It also told how many times to crank the phone before and after calling another telephone and then terminating the call. I did not know about cranking the phone the after the conversation was over. The phone company wanted calls limited to three minutes. The operator would cut people off after that time, and the operator would not give a warning before cutting them off as they did not have the time. My sisters could not have survived in that environment.
Keeping tabs on bills other people create on one’s phone is up to the person renting the phone. It was not the responsibility of the phone company. When trying to get an open line and finding another person on the party line talking, hang up immediately because it is not polite to listen in.
As a youngster, we had a party line. I remember it was sometimes better than TV. But one had to learn not to laugh or gasp out loud. That was tough to put in practice, especially for a really young person. And my sisters said it was very rude to find out other people were doing what we were doing. At the time, I understood that reasoning and did not see the irony.
The Brookville American’s number was 111. Brookville Democrat was 2. My Long Suffering Wife works in the clerk’s office. That number was 176.
What I am supposed to be doing is finding the names of doctors and then typing those onto my list. An example of this is:
Hanna, Dr. R.L. He first appeared in the 1909 phone book. He was just listed as a doctor. But in 1910, he had an ad in the phone book, which was printed by Ben Winans printing company. In that ad, it said Hanna was a veterinarian and dentist. I think I have been to some of those dentists with that skill set. The 1914 ad said Dr. Hanna was a veterinarian surgeon and dentist. Apparently, he had gained a skill in a few years time. The ad said he had a residence on East 11th Street in Brookville. The ad in the 1916 phone book said: “horses treated by day or week, call answered promptly day or night.”
While researching the doctors in the phone book, I realized we needed to make a list of all the businesses in the county’s history: who owned them, when and where they were. That should take a millennium or so.
So, between mangling library card procedures, I find myself lost in the phone book history. And yes, I did look up my parents’ number in the 1972 phone book. I was 15 at the time. It was kind of startling to see it. It was like for a brief moment instead of just seeing dad’s name and our address in Liberty, I saw the black telephone sitting on this big shelving unit in my parents’ bedroom with the phone number 458-5654. Note to how people lived in 1972, there was a loaded .38 revolver on the top shelf of the shelving unit, and it had been there since I was very little and had good climbing abilities.
It almost made me cry remembering that telephone and the conversations around it and on it until I remembered Karen smugly telling me her definition of special.