As for many other Baby Boomers, our family’s phone number from half a century ago easily comes to mind — though I won’t say what it was, since it’s a nostalgic part of some of my computer passwords.
Grandpa and Grandma Bell were on a rural party line. Seems to me the signal that a call was for them was four short rings close together — one for each letter in their surname —  then repeated after a pause. If she had nothing better to do, Grandma would quietly pick up the receiver no matter who the call was for, comfortably settling on an old kitchen chair to listen in on private conversations.
“Mom! You shouldn’t do that,” my mother would scold, but Grandma was impervious to her daughter’s gentle reprimands — including about her comfortable cotton shirts, which were worn thin as cobwebs and fastened with safety pins.
Checking our family’s listing was a minor thrill each year when new phonebooks came out. It was sort of a badge of membership in the community. That the number of a girl I had a crush on was on a nearby page was a ridiculously big thrill in that wholesome age.
Here on the Washington coast, I continued looking up my listing each year until a decade ago when our landline went the way of the dinosaurs.

Who was Miss Sherman?

Like landlines, phonebooks are going extinct as listings and advertising are vacuumed up by the giant Internet monster. Last week a sad, residual Pacific County directory arrived in my mailbox. It had 12 and a half pages of phone numbers, down from 60 pages a decade ago. Our local population has increased and cell phones have definitely proliferated, but cell numbers aren’t listed and are difficult to find. As an experiment, I just challenged the ChatGPT artificial intelligence service to find my listing but it was unable to do so… for now.
Phone numbers and directories came into being in the late-1870s on the East Coast. Around here, I know there were phones — though not necessarily phonebooks — by at least 1905, from when a bill from the Pacific States Telephone & Telegraph Co., shows canneryman Mr. McGowan phoning “Miss Sherman.” These frequent calls — I hope they resulted in a successful romance — were classified as long distance even though they were within a few miles of one another. Each cost 25 cents, roughly $8.40 today.

Three-quarters of a century

Some mid-1950s peninsula and Naselle phonebooks were a happy discovery a couple weeks ago. They have about the same number of pages as the one for 2025 that came in the mail — phones were just being phased in back then and not everyone had one. These directories are a thought-provoking snapshot of our towns at a time when they were considerably smaller — Pacific County had a year-round population of 14,000, compared to our current 24,000 plus thousands more seasonal residents.
Leafing through them, there are many names I recognize — often the parents and relations of friends. Even the yellow pages are entertaining.
The first number in the 1954 Ilwaco Telephone and Telegraph Co. directory is for Carl Aase, popular educator and school superintendent for whom the current Fishermen gym is named. His number was MIssn 2-4222. Wayne O’Neil, Clyde Sayce, Charles Mulvey, Sid Snyder, Lee Wiegardt, Roy Starr, John Campiche and Bill O’Meara are only a few of the many whose faces I can well recall.
The Altoona Cannery, along one of the prettiest stretches of the Columbia River, is the first listing in the June 1954 Western Wahkiakum County Telephone Company directory, number 2215. Carlton Appelo, the expansive Larson family, Wilho Saari, the Raistakkas (miss you Phil!) and Ted Swanson are familiar names from out that way.
The ads illuminate much simpler choices of 70 years ago. Three restaurants bought listings: Corner Cafe in Ilwaco, Red’s Sandwich Shop in Long Beach, and Russell’s Cafe in Seaview. Three doctors: John Campiche, L.C. Neace, and C.W. Van Rooy. If they weren’t in their offices, each invited patients to call their listed home numbers.
Merle & Jack’s Richfield Service in Naselle boasted “For the Best in Lubrication.”
Even in 1956, phones apparently were a little bit of a mystery to some folks. Ilwaco T&T suggests “it pays to answer telephone calls PROMPTLY. Prompt answering of your telephone’s ring is thoughtful, courteous, and good business.”
And, “Wait a few seconds longer before you hang up after placing a call — perhaps the person you are calling is almost there and eager to answer you!”