Printed on vast amounts of paper, city directories and telephone books were popular in Arkansas more than 100 years. By the mid 20th century, Arkansas phone companies published annual directories.
These books listed the name, address and phone number of every customer, except a few clever ones. Armies of part-time drivers delivered copies of each year's new directory to all the telephone customers.
By the 1990s, Southwestern Bell's annual book for the Little Rock/North Little Rock area weighed 4 pounds and more.
And every January, most of the past year's phone books went to live at the landfill.
Fans of Hints by Heloise suggested enveloping your old phone book in an old towel to create a booster seat for toddlers, or tearing out the pages to wrap food scraps for the compost. A murder suspect in 1990 claimed that Pulaski County deputies had repurposed two old phone books by hitting him in the head with them.
A mysterious process called "recycling" was in use elsewhere in the 1960s; but it was another three decades before recycling old phone books became a mainstream practice in Central Arkansas.
In 1989, the Southwestern Bell Co. developed a recycling program in small communities. Fort Howard Paper Co. in Muskogee, Okla., wanted the books to make recycled-paper toilet paper and paper towels, and Georgia-Pacific Corp. in Pryor Creek, Okla., made recycled-paper roofing shingles.
In January 1992, with a new round of 390,000 books about to be delivered, Bell brought its Project ReDirectory to Pulaski County. Then-Lt. Gov. Jim Guy Tucker tossed the inaugural 1991 book into a Dumpster outside a Harvest Foods.
Businesses, schools, Scouts and church groups pitched in, taking carloads of old phone books to collection bins at 18 Harvest Foods stores.
The Just Do It 4-H Club participated, too; and that is how 7-year-old Conley Hallmark wound up frowning at dozens of 1991 phone books in the bed of a pickup pictured in the Jan. 19, 1992, Democrat-Gazette. His club took more than 300 books from Twin City Bank locations to a Harvest Foods in Maumelle.
To learn more about Arkansas phone books, see arkansasonline.com/13vault.