Item: Abilene City Government Flier, circa 1960

(click for larger image)

This piece came to me inside a book that I had purchased, it was probably being used as a bookmark. I often purchase books in lots, and have found some interesting things between the pages!

It is a small piece, about 3 inches by 5 inches.  The front lists some facts about Abilene city government, the location of city offices, and a nice bar graph showing the trends in tax rates for the decade 1950 to 1960.

On the back is a phone directory of city offices. Note that the telephone numbers all start with 'OR'. This is from the old telephone exchange naming system (as a kid my phone number was HOme 5-5654). I found out that the OR corresponds to the ORchard exchange in Abilene.

If you want to find out more about the old alpha telephone exchanges, a great site is The Telephone Exchange Name Project.

Why Virtual Ephemera?

Ephemera: "the minor transient documents of everyday life." - Maurice Rickards

In this day of CD's and DVD's and other "permanent" forms of media, who cares about some slips of paper or cardboard left in the bottom of grandma's trunk or stuck between the pages of a book?  And perhaps more importantly, why should we care?

To the first question, obviously I do.  And so do a growing number of museums, libraries, and other repositories of our written history.

The reason "why" is that they are a part of our history.  They help portray the history that is most often left out of our history books - not the stories of grand events and famous people, but the history of every day; everyday events in the lives of average people.  Who among us doesn't have a box of keepsakes, little mementos of times in our lives we want to remember?  They are part of who we are, and how we came to be who we are, and their ephemeral nature makes them as precious as the memories they provoke in our minds.  Through them, the memories live on.