The letters pages in pulp mags and comic books also printed the addresses of letter writers. Thus putting readers in direct contact with each other and birthing organized fandom.
I’m an armchair enthusiast of etymology. I often look up words to see where they come from, but somehow it never occurred to me to look up the origins of cetane. Talk about an interesting random fact - thanks for finding that.
Granted the Brotherhood of Man has no original members, but they have had the same 4-person line-up since 1974, and with the exception of a short hiatus in the 80s have been touring and performing together ever since.
And I quite like them. And so does my mum.
I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on that one. 
In other news:
I was foolish enough to google BFHS, thinking that I might find out where it was. No luck, but I;m pleased I did, because now I know that these guys exist, which pleases me:
j
As recently as the 1970’s, our local newspapers published the names and addresses of lottery winners (in Montreal at the time, lotteries were still technically illegal, so it was disguised as a “voluntary tax”). Earlier papers would publish the names and addresses of everyone killed in an accident.
That’s the Benjamin Franklin High School in Rochester, NY that I referred to in post #183. The 1935 yearbook is available on this page.
Ah, sorry, I had forgotten that post. Thanks for the link, btw - I just took a peek and it’s a different world.
j
Some things didn’t change. I just took a look at my 1968 yearbook and there it was, my address under my picture.
The old “society pages” were good source-material for burglars too. Truman Capote’s black and white ball generated much anticipatory press, including attendance by Alice Longworth Roosevelt. While she was up in NYC, robbers struck her DC home. The heist was noteworthy enough that major newspapers stopped giving thieves advance notice. For her part, Princess Alice planted poison ivy around her house’s foundation.
That happened in Australia as well. In 1960, Bazil Thorne won the Opera House lottery (run to raise funds for the building of the Sydney Opera House). His 8-year old son, Graeme, was kidnapped for ransom. The child ended up dead. (The killer was found and jailed for life).
The law was changed after that to provide the option for ‘anonymity’ for lottery winners. The law is now usually ‘anonymity by default’, unless the lottery winner specifically asks for publicity.
The use of street addresses is how we know that the Fred Trump arrested at a klan rally in the 1920s was, indeed, Donald’s father.
Question for mansion and yacht owners only*: who played on these three songs?
(Caveat: my cite says that they played on “My Baby Loves Lovin’” by White Plains etc, but it’s possible that this is just badly worded and they played on a knock-off copy for one of those hits compilation albums. I can’t (yet) find a confirmatory source.)
Answer: Rick Wakeman
Cite - see under Various Artists
j
* - not really; this is nothing more that me messing around and using a style of question asking from an ancient British TV show, Ask The Family. Question for father and youngest child only - that sort of thing
The nugget about My Baby Loves Lovin etc comes from about half-way down a rabbit hole I stumbled into. Out on the bike, with my mind wandering, I thought: “If it’s the Trident piano* on Bang A Gong (Get It On) by T Rex, does that mean it was Rick Wakeman playing it?" (Answer: at least some of the piano part, it seems). Which led me to a site listing his sessions (see my previous post); which led me to a search for Super Hits Of The Seventies on YouTube; and then, to establish if the songs are by the original artists, I had to listen to In The Summertime from that album to try to determine if it really is Mungo Jerry (it appears to be); which led me to singer and songwriter Ray Dorsett’s wiki page; which produced 2 more interesting facts
(1) He also wrote Feels Like I’m In Love, a hit for Kelly Marie though, bizarrely, wiki says he wrote it for Elvis Presley. The hit by the former means that Dorsett is one of few people to had a UK number one themselves and written a number one for someone else.
(2) Dorsett now lives in Dorset. C’mon now, that’s irresistible, isn’t it?
j
* - see post 3820 et seq of part 1 of this thread
When I hear his son playing, it immediately reminds me of the father
Never mind. Will repost later.
Back in the era of telephone books, it was normal and expected. People wanted their address to be available publicly…
The people who were worried about it would hide their name, not their address. For example, single women living alone would sometimes not list their full first name, only the initial.
Because that was the only option other than being unlisted (which also cost extra).
When I was a kid in Madrid there were two different telephone books available: one, the most commonly used one, was sorted alphabetically by usernames, and it included the name (sometimes only the initials of the first name), often the address and always the telephone number. The other one was sorted by addresses: all the streets, alphabetically too, then by number, and all the names of the users in that particular house with their respective numbers.
The weird thing was that the first book, the “normal” one sorted by usernames, was considerably thicker than the other one.
It was the same in Barcelona and probably in all of Spain.
I knew people who did that as long as telephone books lasted. In fact, I knew a married professor who kept her last name rather than take her husband’s. She had the listing as C. [Last Name] forever. I think she felt she was more likely to be subjected to harassment from errant students than a random woman.
We had something like the address book too, called a city directory. They were mostly thought of as alternatives to the yellow pages, the listing of all business telephones (plus paid ads). Very useful when cities were centered on downtown and many buildings housed both businesses and residents and people just walked around their neighborhoods for goods and services, less so when the suburbs started to sprawl and the expense to produce them did as well.