Alabama Book Spotlight: Birmingham Yellow Pages for 1920

Telephone yellow pages are a utilitarian publication that later serve as a snapshot of the cities included. Other directories are useful in similar ways; an earlier post on this blog has an overview of some old Birmingham directories. Let's take a closer look at the 1920 yellow pages for Birmingham and see what we find.

The first page has information about the directory itself and advertisements for three companies for common services still needed today--storage, laundry and taxicabs. Love that AT&T logo.

A number of clubs are listed; some of them are still active today. I find it interesting that the city already had an automobile club in 1920. We Americans love our clubs, don't we?

Now on to another service still widely used today--hotels. Information about some of these facilities can be found on the BhamWiki site. At least one is still around, the Tutwiler, even if not in the location listed here.

In 1920 the area had several newspapers and publishing companies; at least two of the newspapers, the Alabama Baptist and Birmingham News are still being published. The Progressive Farmer and Southern Medical Journal are also still around.

The city also had a number of photography studios in this time before cheap cameras and then cell and smart phones with cameras. Below this listing is an ad for one of the studios, Lollar's Kodak Parlor. We also see a listing for Oscar V. Hunt, one of Birmingham's best known photographers. 

Of course, the city had plenty of restaurants in 1920. The Britling Cafeteria listed on 1st Avenue may be the original business in what became a chain of cafeterias in Birmingham and and other cities in Alabama and Tennessee. The chain lasted into the 1980s. Elvis Presley's mother Gladys worked at one of the Memphis locations. The only establishment on this list still in operation is the wonderful Bright Star in Bessemer which had already been open for thirteen years. Long may it thrive. 

Only one of the theaters listed in 1920 has survived, the Lyric. Thank goodness restoration of that gem is underway. "Lyric" was a common name for vaudeville and movie theaters back in the day. I saw many movies at the Lyric Theatre in downtown Huntsville. 

Here's another striking advertisement from the yellow pages:

And finally, here are two listings for a type of firm you don't see much of these days:

I plan to do another post soon on the long list of doctors in the 1920 Birmingham yellow pages. 

What's in those Old Birmingham Directories, Anyway?

If they survive, all sorts of ephemeral materials from the past can be of interest to historians, genealogists, entrepreneurs, and even the rest of us. Whether its pulp magazines, baseball cards, advertising flyers or directories of all types, these products can tell us something about the people who produced and used them, are listed in them and the time in which they were created.

Three such items related to Birmingham I’d like to examine in this post:  Fred W. Green’s The Birmingham Church Directory published by the Dispatch Stationary Company in 1896;  R.W A. Wilda’s  Birmingham, Alabama: Facts Worth Knowing published by the Caldwell Printing Company in September, 1889; and the 1920 telephone yellow pages for the city. The church directory and the telephone book were found online at Birmingham Public Library’s Digital Collections. The Wilda pamphlet came from the Library of Congress via Google Books.

The church directory is 80 pages long and covers various Christian denominations around the city: Baptist, Christian, Catholic, Episcopal, Methodist and the largest number, Presbyterians. One Hebrew congregation is also given. Near the end is a listing of the sixteen church locations. The listings include histories of the churches and current members. South Side Baptist, for instance, has over seven two-column pages of members.

Wilda, a native of Germany, was co-owner of a real estate firm; and his booklet is one of many issued in the city’s early days to attract investment. He includes information on Birmingham streets, water works, sewers, schools, street car lines, banks, main industries and railroads. Information on black institutions in categories such as churches and schools is included. A listing of “Buildings” street by street is useful to us in establishing what existed at the time of publication. For instance, we learn that the Caldwell Hotel was located on the corner of First Avenue and 22^nd Street.

The telephone yellow pages are a veritable snapshot of the city in 1920. The 44 pages offer categories for everything from Abstractors to X-Ray Supplies. In between are numerous doctors, lawyers, produce merchants and over two-and-a-half pages of grocers. Thirteen theaters are listed; the Lyric is the only one still surviving. Only one power company is listed; you guessed it, Alabama Power Company. The directory also includes such categories as Bath Houses, Billiard Halls and something called Ladies Toggery—as in clothing.

A fascinating aspect of the 1920 yellow pages is the lack of segregation, as the listing for “Doctors” demonstrates. Scattered among the mostly white ones are some of the city’s early black physicians.  Arthur McKinnon Brown, Logwood Ulysses Goin and Ulysses Grant Mason apparently had the same office at 310 North 18^th Street at this time. Brown and Goin had the same phone number, Main 503, but Mason’s was Main 2. Also listed is an early female physician, Annie M. Robinson. Although several women had practiced medicine in Birmingham in the 1890s and very early 20^th century, she may have been the only one in 1920.

Near the end of the telephone directory is a table giving “Long Distance Rates from Birmingham.” Most of the cities listed are in Alabama, but a few such as Washington, D.C., and Pensacola are included for comparison. The table notes that rates for over 70,000 locations are available from the long distance operator. Two basic types of calls were station-to-station, which meant the caller would talk with anyone who answered, or person-to-person.  Such calls to Hartselle, for instance, would cost 50 cents and 60 cents respectively for the “initial period”, which the table does not define.  

Publication of the two directories was supported by advertising from many local merchants scattered across lots of pages. Southside grocer J.E. Minter placed a large ad just after the title page in the church directory. Bodeker’s National Detective Agency had a full page ad in the telephone directory, which tells us that their main office in Alabama was located in the Brown-Marx building and branch offices in the state in Mobile and Montgomery. The Wilda pamphlet is “Compliments of the Bankers of Birmingham.”

These publications offer us the names of numerous individuals and their relationships with businesses and institutions. The advertisements, tables, and lists tell us much about the way life was lived in the city at the moment of publication. We can look at them now with a sense of wonder at not only how much has changed, but how much remains the same all these decades later. 

       

This piece originally appeared on the DiscoverBirmingham.org site in December 2013.