Next on the Discard Pile: The Rolodex of Memories

First I replaced the LG dumbphone with the Samsung Galaxy S5 smartphone, then I stopped renewing my annual purchase of monthly Day-Timer inserts and now . . . I'm ditching the Rolodex.

Unlike the other techno tools, I haven't used my Rolodex in years. I had a circular one once, but the current one is flat. After a recent move, I'm trying to simplify my life and a Rolodex brimming with cards for people from decades past at companies that no longer exist looks like a prime candidate for Goodwill. Jotted in my jiggly handwriting and free from any email addresses, URLs and Twitter handles, the cards record a pre-digital life that must be impossible for young people to imagine. Those were the days you memorized phone numbers and carried them in your head, not your pocket.

Still, I linger before sending it off, mostly because the names evoke times and places, both personal and professional.

Most of the cards date from 1987 to 1995, when I was the east coast editor of Video Store Magazine. The cards give contacts at movie studios, retailers and trade associations involved with entertainment and consumer electronics. Some cards of note:

• CompUSA
• Bizarre Video Productions
• Mark Harrad, the very savvy PR manager for the anti-piracy program of the Motion Picture Association of America. He would arrange for members of the press to attend FBI raids on places making or selling illegal videos; I was an observer at a Brooklyn raid, an edge experience.
• Sega
• Kay Bee Toys
• Montgomery Ward
• New York Public Library telephone reference
• Artist Mark Kostabi, who did a book of his paintings called "Sadness Because the Video Rental Store Was Closed;" I did a story about the book and he gave me a copy, which I still have
• Tandy Corp.
• Atari Computer Corp.(written on the back of a Rolodex card that bore the name and phone number of a fellow Princetonian I dated once, more details to come)

Video Store laid me off 20 years ago this month, ending my career in business journalism, so those cards lost any value, but I hung on to them anyway.


Other cards stir memories of personal connections:

• The phone number for the Harriman Institute at Columbia University; I fantasized about studying Russian there and becoming a kremlinologist or East Bloc-hopping journalist in the twilight of the USSR. But I stayed in journalism and fate took me in a very different suburban direction.
• Project Dorot, a group matching volunteers with the Jewish elderly, where I was a friendly visitor from 1980 to 1994, teamed with a German immigrant named Rena Frank.
• A woman named Shira, who I had one date with and then we both moved on to other things and she made a very good life for herself.
• A woman named Shula (a/k/a Sheila when I met her at a singles event in 1981). We had a date on my 25th birthday and a photo shows us both looking spiffy. She's wearing a beret like Faye Dunaway wore in "Bonnie and Clyde." She urged me to eat organic foods and was into algae products.
• That fellow Princetonian who I dated once or twice, who has the same 212 phone number, over 30 years later. Good for you!
• Women with the confusingly universal Jewish name combination of Laura/Laurie/Lori/Lauri/Lauren Friedman/Freeman/Friedman/Friedmann/Freidman. I could never remember which was which, although one walked out on a first date we had to see Shakespeare in Central Park. She had to get ready to go to the Hamptons the next day and she saw I was "really enjoying the play," so she up and left during the intermission. I scratched her off my dating list, but I kept the phone number, or was that the number for Lori/Lorie/Laurie/Laura/Lauren in Brooklyn who liked to get stoned? I'll never know. Trying to find one Laurie Friedman in New York is like trying to find one Maria Garcia in Texas -- the proverbial needle in the haystack of similar names.
• Texas Monthly, when I dreamed of relocating to Austin in 1990 for a completely different career in journalism.

Two or three decades separate me from these people and memories. Technology moved on. The discardable contact entries in cellphones and computers store the intricate contact details for hundreds of contacts, across multiple phones and emails. I make no more scribbled updates on Rolodex cards or address books. I type updates in bloodless Arial fonts, or just hit "delete and they're gone.
The Rolodex kept the old paper life around long after the Rolodex lost its use. I'll save some of the cards just for old time's sake (a sentimental weakness of mine). But something's got to give in my endless efforts to declutter and this small tool, a rope tying me to the past that will never be relevant again, has got to go.

Still, for all I know, Shira/Shula/Laurie/Lauren still has a forgotten address book that includes some guy (wasn't he a writer? Whatever happened to him?) who lived at 131 Amity Street in Brooklyn.