In the days before digitalization, people looked straight ahead when they walked, sometimes making eye contact. In the summers, it was hot at night (earth air temperature has risen only .5 degrees since Eisenhower), so people without air-conditioners sat on stoops or porches and conversed with passersby and neighbors.

If a disagreement arose, say, over how many strikeouts Lefty Gomez amassed in his career, precise information was difficult to come by. Unless someone could produce an almanac or up-to-date encyclopedia, the disagreement couldn’t be settled until later. Sometimes people called librarians to look up the answers to their questions, though, of course, libraries weren’t open at night. On some nights you might hear people raising their voices in disagreement over Gomez’s strikeouts or the name of the last Triple Crown winner.

However, in the daytime, most librarians would cheerfully agree to research your questions. In those days, most white workingwomen wore flesh-colored hose, which they attached to undergarments called garter belts, elastic contraptions worn around the waist that had metal clasps dangling around the garter belts’ circumferences. Women (and a few men known as transvestites) attached the top of their hose (also called stockings) to the clasps of the garter belts.

Most librarians were female in the days before digitalization. To find the answer to the riddle of the number of strikeouts, they left their stations behind a desk and walked to retrieve the information from a reference volume classified by the Dewey Decimal System. If the librarian were plump, the chafing of her hose would produce a swish-swish sound.

When she called to inform the questioner that Lefty Gomez had struck out 1,468 in his major league career, she had to dial the questioner’s number, each digit clicking clockwise downward to engage. Depending on the size of the community, telephone numbers might consist of as few as four digits. However, it took longer to dial four digits then than it does to punch in ten digits today. Before the 1960’s, all telephones were black.

In the days before digitalization, people were thinner (average female waist circumference 1950: 71.2 cm; circumference today: 91.44 cm). Rather than dieting or joining a gym, a librarian might wear a girdle, a constricting undergarment creating the illusion of a flat abdomen. These armor-like undergarments restricted movement. When a girdled librarian approached a talker with her forefinger pressed to her lips to issue a shushing sibilant, she could appear militaristic in her carriage.  Libraries were as quiet as mausoleums. They housed only books, magazines, and phonographic records.

In those days, dairies delivered milk to people’s porches on weekdays. Virtually all milk delivers were male.  Milkmen worked early hours and drove UPS-like trucks with open doors. They had daily routes, like paperboys, who rode bicycles.  Because of their recurrent journeys around the grids of city streets, milkmen got the reputation of producing children out-of-wedlock. In the days before digitalization, condoms were about the only mechanical means of birth control.

While he was at work using company time to call a librarian regarding Gomez’s strikeouts, a man’s wife could be going through the time-consuming activity of undressing in preparation for a tryst with a milkman. For each digit her husband dialed, she could unclasp on average two garter connections, completely disengaging the hose before the first grating sound simulating the distant phone’s ringing.

In movies, women called this process “slipping into something more comfortable.” Because of the conspicuousness of a milk truck parked on the curb outside a house, these sexual unions were completed rapidly. They took place in less time than it took the librarian to receive the call, research the question, and return the cuckold’s call.

If someone’s child had red hair in an otherwise dark-haired family, the jovial answer to the question “where did you get that red-hair” was “from the milkman.”

In fact, people still us this phrase even though milkmen have gone the way of hardbound encyclopedias, ink stamps, and ox ploughs.