Yellow Pages

Besides showing you where to shop, last year's Philadelphia yellow pages showed you how to get around on mass transit and how to find zip codes. In this year's book, released this month by Bell Telephone Co. of Pennsylvania, you'll also find that selecting Section 258 at Veterans Stadium will get you a 50-yard-line seat at Philadelphia Eagles games, that the city's population was 1.5 million at the turn of the century and that the Great Teddy Bear Rally is scheduled for June at the Philadelphia Zoo. Welcome to the new world of phone-book competition.

Competition for Yellow Pages readers and advertisers has increased since the days when comic actor Martin Mull was the star of a series of lighthearted ads for Bell Atlantic Corp.'s Yellow Pages directories. So the Philadelphia telecommunications company last year turned to a new theme: the Yellow Pages as matchmaker between business and customer. Now, the phone company has turned to the resonant voice and commanding presence of actor James Earl Jones to present that theme. Neither Bell Atlantic nor its Philadelphia ad agency, Lewis Gilman & Kynett, would reveal the cost of the new television and radio campaign.

If the marketing executives for the Donnelley Directories have their way, South Jersey residents' fingers will soon be talking instead of walking across the yellow pages. "We realized that what was missing all these years was the opportunity to make information in the yellow pages as up-to-date and timely as possible," said Dennis Murphy, assistant vice president of marketing and advertising for Donnelley, about the company's "talking yellow pages," now being test- marketed in the Philadelphia area and projected to become available in South Jersey sometime next year.

A unit of Nynex Corp., the New York-area phone company, said yesterday that customers could now search electronic yellow pages with personal computers connected to phone lines - a symbolically important first step toward services that may someday be available to all telephone customers. The service is the first on-line information product offered by any of the regional Bell telephone companies since a federal appeals court ruled in the fall that phone companies could get into this line of business.

Malcolm W. McDonald, 80, a longtime president of the National Telephone Directory in New Jersey, died Monday at his home in Haddonfield. He had lived in Delray Beach, Fla., for about the last 20 years, and had had a home in Haddonfield since the early 1960s. He was born and reared in Dedham, Mass. Mr. McDonald retired in 1984 after serving as president for 20 years. He started as a sales trainee in 1948 with the Von Hoffman Corp., which was the original firm producing the directory, called the Yellow Pages.

Donnelley Directory recently published a yellow pages book in Orlando, Fla., and it quickly became the victim of a massive rip-off - people immediately began ripping the directory's glossy, colorful street map out of books that were kept in public places. The case of the purloined maps brings a smile to the face of Donnelley vice president Gary D. Reeves, who is overseeing his company's debut as a yellow pages publisher in Pennsylvania. It demonstrated the directory's value, says Reeves.

Thwummp! Was that a sonic boom? Or just another phone directory - bigger than a doorstop, heavier than a hard drive - landing on your front steps? It's a sound people will be hearing less this year. The icon known as the residential phone directory is going away. More and more, only people who ask for them will get them. It's partly about waste. Not to mention the digital crowd's who-needs-it-anyway attitude. Internet directories - with online ops and apps - are proliferating.

Yellow-page directory publishers are paying to get your fingers to walk through their pages. Both Bell of Pennsylvania and arch-rival Donnelley Directory have joined a trend toward using sweepstakes as a marketing tool, giving away cash and prizes worth thousands of dollars. "The main reason we're doing it is to encourage people to keep our book and use our book. We're in a very competitive marketplace today," said Michael F. Kurdziel, a manager of sales operations and customer services for Bell's yellow pages.

Mounting telephone book competition might be enough to keep even Clark Kent's super powers from finding enough elbow room in a phone booth the next time he needs to change his clothes. Donnelley Directory, which is competing with Bell of Pennsylvania's yellow pages, wants consumers to have the choice of using two classified directories in Bell phone booths. But Bell won't allow Donnelley's books in its booths. So Donnelley has gone to the state Public Utility Commission for either permission to put its books in Bell's booths or an order that would ban all yellow pages from the phone booths.

BREAST IMPLANTS Forget silicone. Peanut-oil-filled implants could mean safer breast enlargements for thousands of women who have the surgery each year, says Washington University radiologist Judy Destouet. Because the oil is transparent, such implants do not interfere with X-ray mammography for breast cancer the way silicone breast implants can, Destouet says. The new implants could be commerically available in about two years. SWIMMING-POOL COVERS Swimming-pool owners, beware: Solar-pool covers pose a special drowning risk to young children, who may incorrectly believe they are solid enough to support their weight, a study in the journal Pediatrics reports.

With a few taps on a touch pad, an anonymous prankster can virtually wipe out a business on Google Places, the search engine's version of the Yellow Pages. A coffee shop in Kansas and a bed and breakfast in Hawaii were victims of malicious reports that led Google's service to show they were "permanently closed. " The owners noticed a drop-off in business, checked their Google listings and struggled to have the information corrected. No one seems to know how many other businesses have been hurt by similarly inaccurate reports.

Marie Smith thinks about it every day, thinks about the time when Kermit Gosnell almost single-handedly ended her life. It was 1999. Smith was 19 years old and five months pregnant when she ended up at Gosnell's West Philadelphia office after she found his name in the Yellow Pages. She wanted an abortion. Gosnell botched it, botched it so badly that Smith got violenty ill and had to be taken to Presbyterian Hospital, where doctors found her fetus's arm and a leg still inside of her. Smith, 31, didn't hesitate yesterday when she was asked what should happen to Gosnell now that he's been charged with murder, infanticide and abuse of a corpse for decades' worth of negligent and criminal behavior.

Thwummp! Was that a sonic boom? Or just another phone directory - bigger than a doorstop, heavier than a hard drive - landing on your front steps? It's a sound people will be hearing less this year. The icon known as the residential phone directory is going away. More and more, only people who ask for them will get them. It's partly about waste. Not to mention the digital crowd's who-needs-it-anyway attitude. Internet directories - with online ops and apps - are proliferating.

Question: I know you've written many times about cleaning decks, but mine is looking kind of dingy and, because it sits on the north side of our house, is coated in mildew. The deck is gray, but the color is more greenish-black. Can you dig into your files and see if you can find your advice? I would have liked to have gotten it done for July 4. Maybe I'll get it done in time for Labor Day. Thanks. Answer: First, if you don't want to do the job yourself - especially if it has been a while since the last cleaning - there are companies that will do it for you. Check out the Yellow Pages or ask your friends or neighbors for recommendations.

We think of our homes as castles, fortified against the world with wood, windows, locks, alarm systems. Despite all our precautions, though, sometimes intruders break in. There was that bird, as wild-eyed and terrified as I was. There was the mouse that met a sad fate in our basement. Then there were those two squirrels that, several years apart, shimmied down the chimney. We handled each of these intrusions largely by ourselves. Nothing, however, prepared us for the latest onslaught - an army of yellow jackets.

Malcolm W. McDonald, 80, a longtime president of the National Telephone Directory in New Jersey, died Monday at his home in Haddonfield. He had lived in Delray Beach, Fla., for about the last 20 years, and had had a home in Haddonfield since the early 1960s. He was born and reared in Dedham, Mass. Mr. McDonald retired in 1984 after serving as president for 20 years. He started as a sales trainee in 1948 with the Von Hoffman Corp., which was the original firm producing the directory, called the Yellow Pages.

For Kathleen Sullivan, it was a choice between dust bunnies and her daughter. Her daughter won. Sullivan, a working mom and sales representative in Yardley, decided to pay a local service, Alycia's House Cleaning and Detailing, $50 every other week to clean her three-bedroom, 2.5-bath townhouse. "I debated about it for at least a year because I thought it would be a splurge," says Sullivan. "I realized that instead of vacuuming, I could spend the time with my daughter. Then it was an easy choice.

Thirteen women, all from either Korea or Thailand, were arraigned yesterday on prostitution charges stemming from police raids this week on four 24-hour massage parlors in downtown Atlantic City. Police sources said some of the women were believed to have been brought over from Asia and forced to work as prostitutes in parlors allegedly run by Asian organized crime. The women typically work six months in a city before being moved to another location, police said, and operate under an "indentured servant" status, to pay off the expense of bringing them to the United States.

Hold onto that new copy of the Bell Atlantic White Pages Directory for Philadelphia. It has to last until February 2000. Bell Atlantic Corp. began distributing a special 18-month city edition Monday. Phone company officials say they devised this one-time, long-life phone book to synchronize the distribution of the White and Yellow Pages so that in 2000 Philadelphia consumers will receive both directories at once - just like most Bell Atlantic customers. Stephanie Hobbs, spokeswoman for Bell Atlantic Directory Services, said the move was part of corporate efforts to standardize its phone directories.

While consumers' fingers stroll through the yellow pages, owners of specialized directories are taking off at full gallop. Bell Atlantic Corp. and the other offspring of AT&T are not the only publishers of the books people turn to to find a business. Directories targeted to specific groups - from Hispanic and Chinese people to women and gays - play a role in the multibillion-dollar industry. Philadelphia has proven to be ripe territory for these specialized books, ripe enough for some publishers to make plans to expand.