DIRECTORY RIVALS

Greymouth Evening Star, 11 April 1933, Page 4

DIRECTORY RIVALS

SMITH WINS THE RACE. Once and for all the ancient rivalry of the New York Smiths and the Cohens is settled, says the “Literary Digest.” The Smiths win. Besides conquering the nearest rival in easy fashion, the Smiths also polish off the Browns, the Joneses, the Johnsons, and the other big families. By a margin of ten feet of type in the first volume of (he New York City directory, they leave the Cohens a badlybeaten runner-up. The writer says: “The Smith family meanders along for 94ft, at fourteen lines of type an inch. The Cohens cover 84ft, the Browns 67ft, and the procession of big shots in the space world is brought up by the Millers, the Johnsons, the Williamses, and the Joneses, in that order.

“The canvassers turned up authentic namesakes of John Bull, Al Capone, Eurico Caruso. Charles Chaplin, Christopher Columbus, Oliver Cromwell, Jack Dempsey, Henry Ford, Robin Hood, Jessie James, Helen Keller, Annie Laurie, Harold Lloyd, Mary Pickford, Paul Revere, Bernard Shaw, and John L. Sullivan. In one particularly good day’s hunting they raised a Woodrow Wilson, a John Doe, and a Richard Roe.”

fi’lie first volume of the directory “is a healthy child,” adds the “New York Herald-Tribune,” “weighing 191 b ami standing 13in. in height.” It contains names, addresses, and occupations of citizens of Manhattan and the Bronx. It “is the first of its kind in seven years and the first in history to include all live boroughs in its prospectus.”

The idea of compiling the. directory was originally that of the Emergency Unemployed' Relief Committee. And it produced 120,000 days of work for the city’s unemployed. Eight hundred canvassers, plodding through all kinds of weather, “asked approximately 100,000,000 questions, some of them embarrassing. They interrogated housewives and got something new in the way of directory mutter—the first name of every wife in the two boroughs. “One great problem confronted thc unemployed data seekers. They found it difficult to pin down the city’s shifting population, members of which, as soon as the compilers turned their hacks, were likely to move to New Jersey or the Canadian Rockies. Coni- ] il;ii.i<.m of tb.c directory hemin in December, 123.1, and in the interval, nearly .1 JJOO.JJOO New Yorkers chanced one home for another Au idea of the magnitude of this problem was furnished by Mr Arthur .Morgan, moving expert., of the firm of Morgan and Brother. .Mr Morgan estimated that about 500.000 citizens (•hanged dwellings last autumn alone at a. time when the directory still was in the making. The Consolidated Gas Company added to this the report that the number of movers last September,, based on meter lockings and unlockings, was close lo 400,000.