This is a telephone book for Scottsboro Alabama dating back to February 1954. For our young readers who have never seen a phonebook before, our ancestors needed these to find the phone numbers of people they knew and/or businesses they needed to contact. One of the benefits for genealogists is the listing often include the street address for the phone number. Telephone companies issued these to their customers in an attempt to lessen the amount of calls they would get “by name” and instead use the number assigned, making it easier on operators. You weren’t able to actually dial the number though, you had to go through a switchboard operator who patched you into the number. Jackson County telephone company created and published the phonebook. An interesting tidbit is found on page 2 where the phone company states that only the customer, his family, or employee in his interest were allowed to use the phone.
The directory comprises pages 3-12 with the classified telephone directory comprising the “yellow pages” of the phonebook. Even in 1954 they published these pages on a more yellow paper. The classifieds were business listings and advertisements.
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