AKRON, Ohio — For parts of Northeast Ohio, the new phone book may have showed up on your front porch this week.
But most of us never use them anymore. If they look unfamiliar, you are young enough to have never needed to use a telephone book. One of those books with every publicly-published telephone numbers listed to whom the phone belongs.
Most are unused now, at least to find a phone number. Occasionally, an old book can be used for something other than for what it was created.
"I've used it to step on things," says Emily Little of Wadsworth. "Pile them up and use them as a stepstool, but that's about it."
But to find another use of the old telephone book, I take you to the Akron Zoo.
There, where the animals are under the care of zookeepers, on occasion the old phone book shows up. In the wild, lemurs would spend their time looking for fruits and vegetables. But at the Akron Zoo, employee Stephanie Minor makes phone book distribution with food sandwiched between the pages.
It's as if the animals made a call, and food delivery showed up.
"So the act of flipping through a phone book is actually simulating that search they would be doing in the forest of Madagascar," Minor explains.
So the Akron Zoo has found a way to make good use of donated telephone books – that once-much-needed compilation of names and numbers of, well, almost everyone. The telephone company still publishes in some areas, but usually, the books are quickly discarded. But the lemurs and some of the other zoo animals screech, "Hold on there, I can use a good phone book."
I grew up in the days of the old rotary phone, which has virtually flown the coop. But the telephone book is still here. The Akron Zoo uses it to give to the animals. It's kind of a plaything. If you'd like to know more about how the telephone book and the animals at the Akron Zoo get together, give the zoo a call.
You may disregard them – all those names and numbers alphabetically listed in the telephone book. But the animals welcome such literature.
At the Akron Zoo, some of the animal population there will tell you the phone book is still a good read.