In memoriam. Jack Cole, the creator of the first telephone address directories using punched card databases, died at the age of 87

For the first time, Jack Cole used early computer technology to sort millions of records with information about addresses and phone numbers of individuals and companies. He created the famous Cole Directory cross-reference series, which today remains an invaluable source of information for detectives, debt collectors, advertising agents, and for anyone who wants to find someone. Cole died July 29 at his home in Spearfish Canyon, South Dakota. He was 87 years old.
Sixty years ago, Cole began publishing the Cole Directory, a series of reference books on cities in the United States. Known as “cross reference guides,” Cole Directories listed lists of residents in each city, ordered by address and phone number.


The first guides to cities in the United States were published shortly after independence was proclaimed in 1776. Although most of them listed lists of residents by last name in alphabetical order, some were ordered by street name, that is, by address. Over the next century and a half, the compilers of such reference books carefully walked house by house, recording the inhabitants of each apartment in each building in each city block.
The revolution that Cole made in 1947 in this business established for decades was to use IBM punch cards for storing and processing data. (Currently, Cole Directories, covering about 200 cities, are published not only in the traditional but also in electronic form by the MetroGroup Corporation of Lincoln, Nebraska).
Cole’s reference books, which quickly became the most popular books in public libraries, proved invaluable for many different uses. Firms sending out advertisements by mail could select for distribution people living in the immediate vicinity of the company. Detectives could systematically interview all the neighbors wanted. A reporter preparing an article about a serial killer for a yellow newspaper could call a family living nearby and record an interview: "He has always been a quiet and polite boy."
Jack Ridnour Cole was born on February 12, 1920 in Lincoln. After graduating from the University of Nebraska School of Economics, he began working at IBM.
He soon moved to Dallas and began working as an IBM sales representative. It was then that Cole came up with the idea of ​​a reference book based on a new technology. He hired typists to punch the full Dallas phone book. Soon followed directories for other cities. Cole used census, tax and other census data, complementing their phone book information.
Cole's wife, nee Louis Keller, whom he married in 1941, died in 1997. Cole has three children - a daughter, Susan Wright (Susan Wright) and two sons, Dana and Geoffrey, sister Patricia, eight grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.
Cole sold his reference business in 1973 and switched to other activities, for example, created a chain of hunting and fishing houses. In the last years of his life, he moved to a hut in the Spearfish Canyon, which had belonged to his family since the 19th century, and devoted himself to environmental protection.
Cole's daughter, Susan, said that among her father’s belongings in the hut was the Cole Directory handbook for Rapid City, South Dakota, 50 miles away.