R L POLK
IT WAS UNREAL stepping into that large room filled with desks, each with a worker, a female, doing something intensely. Polk made telephone books in reverse, that is, listed by other than last and first names, instead by telephone numbers and addresses, then a name or two. This information was gathered by canvassers, freelance guys that went door to door collecting this information. Girls were relegated to clerical work.
They’re still there, in business worldwide though they started in Detroit in 1870. Now I suppose there would be computers on every desk instead of typewriters. I got a job in the stockroom through their test application which I sailed through and was hired on the spot, I guess that was the litmus deal with their management. I just needed a job at the moment. They owned a large building of several floors, brick, an older structure, a watchman stood at the entrance making sure no one left with one of the tomes of listed information which were sold to businesses, largely auto manufacturers but debt collectors liked them too as did banks and all financial institutions, any person or company that wanted ready access to personal information that they couldn’t get from a common telephone book.
Since Marshall McLuhan coined the term, “The Media is the Message”, it’s been downhill ever since, but then we do gain from information too, especially now the internet freebies. Back then though the sense was of a Charlie Chaplin movie, “Modern Times” or “Brazil” or what have you, with CC going round the factory track on the automated assembly line treadmill, Big Brother scene. It was surreal.
I worked there but briefly in shipping and receiving with a fellow from Ireland, Joe Devine. Joe said he quit once to work in the auto factories but quit that in two days and came back to Polk. Couldn’t blame him there. Joe had that wry snicker at life that possibly comes with the British Isles, but I recall him saying one time that the southern folk in Detroit sounded like the English. That was informative because later I did a little research on southern dialect and found that indeed the southern accent was exported direct from southern England and became infused in black vocabulary in their unique style. Blacks still talk that way until they become educated in college – or in Boston where blacks actually speak with the Boston accent, surprising to hear at first.
That was the one and only time I had the insight of those inner sanctums of information gathering but I had occasion thereafter to gain a few glimpses of that phenomenon from a further vector as a carpenter. One company I contracted for had a loudspeaker system on which I actually heard a discarnate voice saying, “[employee number], report to central dispatch” or some such rendition as that. Big Brother indeed. I was also apprised that the company hadn’t “made quota” that month so that was the name of their tune, and the dispirited faces of gloom illustrated that lapse.
Joe Devine glimpsed the wilder life I led once and I perceived his interest but didn’t have the time to pursue corrupting another soul to the inner city life of arts and beatniks. I was soon bound for New York as a songwriting guitar picker. As said, that interlude was brief and a mere interim between fast moving episodes back then in the mid-1960s. Everyone was on the road back then.
R L Polk though carried on with their statistical data processing and no doubt it’s somewhat computerized now. I don’t know if they still produce the tomes of hardbound books of yore but they did so in most states and I believe covered the whole of the country. They’ve branched out to collate most of the world in terms of data collection. Nowadays in fact, there are start-up companies focusing on all manner of planning, even agricultural crop insurance that gathers weather information to sell insurance to farmers, mostly corporate as one might imagine, but the larger private farms too that have learned the value of being covered financially in bad years.
Polk’s main Detroit building was/is located right near the Burroughs Better Business Machines Corporation of which I have written heretofore, a natural fit and I’m convinced was a collusion at some point in time. A friend of mine that worked as a debt collector – and was deeply in debt himself – said his boss would pay for copies of the Detroit book, there being two of those, east and west sides of the sprawling city. Scoping out the possibilities I noted that no, there was no immediate way of getting those tomes past the elderly guard at the door. There may have been other doors I might avail but I wasn’t there that long to find them. Clearly the worth of such books was the main principle behind the company’s existence.
Those guys had a huge work crew to pay since they sent canvassers nationwide or at least to major centers, and of course the multitudinous crew working the typewriters every day. All were automatons of course but for the guys working the streets. Categorizing and listing commercial functions of the populace was the goal, naturally, and the Big Brother image can’t be avoided. I’d have imagined that they’d have been usurped by the internet long since but, no, they’re still involved. They statistically categorize automobiles for the used marketplace via the VIN that each vehicle displays uniquely on the dashboard viewed through the windshield, which relates to the file kept on each vehicle through its lifespan no matter where it ends up, China, wherever.
Back in the mid-60s though, the company concentrated on finding people as well as cars. And of course car thieves would simply remove all traces of identification, chop shop them or paint them and whatever else they do to disguise ownership. People are harder to disguise. I can only imagine that many the absconder was detected through R L Polk directories. Of course currently the numbers that each individual carries can be utilized by any number of government and business agencies to round up those whom they seek, if indeed the individual uses said numbers for transactions of any kind, income tax refunds, driver’s license, Social Security matters &c. The antagonists of legal search feel rather elated at these kinds of research tactics as if they were real sleuths or Private I’s but it’s simply a computer search by number, like looking up your old Gibson or Martin guitar by the serial number and model for year of manufacture.
Polk of the 1960s couldn’t have been as efficient as internet search is now but they seemed to have cornered a market back then. Look at it all now with drones and detection equipment out of sci-fi. Now there is technology that can detect facial features electronically, full body scanners that be-nude the air traveler for all personnel to gawk at if the gawking is rewarding.
In the Detroit Institute of Art resides the famous mural by Diego Rivera of the Detroit auto factories’ assembly lines. It can’t be avoided that Detroit was essentially the starting point for automation. Naturally recordkeeping would follow inclusive of detection. The auto companies and Polk must have collaborated early on but autos weren’t mass produced until the early 19th century so Polk was ahead of its time relating to information services. Now the National Security Agency (NSA) collects dossiers all over the world via their electronic devices and I shouldn’t doubt my typed words present will be monitored. Of course the assembly line has cleaned up its act a good deal since then and has become far more efficient, with just-in-time stock management and the like. With luck we can receive a part next Monday via UPS but then, this is negotiable too due to strikes, holidays &c.
Come to think of it, the R L Polk I walked into in that era was indeed archaic, just like the assembly lines back then. Curiously, though, I recall standing in a lineup of postulants for some auto factory job, all the guys talking to whomever they connected with. The custom then was painting new cars colors that would appeal to the black race, bright greens, gaudy oranges, purple and the like. I was about to remark something derogatory to the white guy in line next to me when I overheard one black kid say to his buddy, “Man, them’s some boss colahs”. No accounting for taste. That was prior to color television even. R L Polk was sold in the early millennial years so it must have worth still. Information technology seems to be the lasting thing. Funny though, most search engine browser sites are free yet they’re claimed to be worth billions. That illogic hasn’t fully been explained yet but some people are making a lot of money at it. Google is appraised at billions yet for me it’s free.
There is the thought that monitoring may be the main impetus behind it all, sort of like the reverse television monitors in NINETEEN-EIGHTY-FOUR. Actually, BRAVE NEW WORLD is scarier in its banality of class system propagation. There may be some reasons to imagine that Aldous Huxley’s version is actually the one partially taking shape now. There are still wars fought physically but with a threat of WWIII nuclear wipeout the détente factor is rife for all but the most rogue states such as North Korea or until recently Iran. No doubt the US has good reason for spying on even its allies since you never know what evil lurks until you shadow them. Of course we don’t know who might be spying on us other than our own government, with the direct complement of the internet browser companies.
Listen, you can’t place an internet ad without some Eastern European conman trying to scam you. We’re immune if looking to buy or sell a used appliance but personal services beget call girls, large expensive purchases beget scams involving “checks” that are larger than the purchase thus must require a check for the balance beyond the purchase, Yeah, sure. If these grammatically challenged entrepreneurs can check out daily advertising, any savvy agent can go a lot further into surveillance and detection. And then we have the burly cop pretending to be a 13-year-old girl on some internet chat site. And the creeps that prowl actually fall for the ruse, show up right on time at the shopping mall to be greeted by the men and women in plain clothes. “Entrapment” as such has no legal meaning or status anymore as it did in the 60s.
Yes, these Polk type places still exist, the endless cubicles and rows of desks, cowed secretaries, snide and wry reporters, clerks and runners, stockmen, guards, bottom lines and quotas, and so on, all extant even in the so-called modern world. Nothing much has really changed though I don’t know about Polk canvassers as to whether they’re still making the rounds physically. Maybe there’re robots handling the shipping and receiving now, even doing the clerical chores. My brief foray into that world of absurdity was a freak show to me but not, I suppose, to the workers and managers, certainly not the owners or customers.
Those canvassers gathered information firsthand from whoever answered the door but the answerer was not paid nor given any gratuities for such information, the canvassers coming on as if census takers, officially sanctioned so they mimed and inferred without backup credentials other than a generic business card. Possibly it’s all done via computer now, I don’t know. Factories are equipped with computers, the Diego Rivera mural of bustling grunting workmen plausibly far removed from the reality, if one can relate to that kind of reality. To me it’s all surreal. It’s all fascinating but after a jaunt around the DIA it’s gratifying to walk out into the atmosphere again after the stifling confines of an art museum, quintuple that for leaving the confines of someplace like R L Polk.
mjmackay 