3699

Four Digits

A few days ago, while browsing through the digital collection of the National Archives of Aruba, I came across something I had not seen in many years: an old Aruba telephone directory. This one was from 1975.

I was about five or six years old then, but I remember those books very well. Every year a new telephone book would arrive at our house. The postman delivered it; the new one would replace the old one, and sometimes my parents would simply put it on top of the previous edition. Eventually the older ones were thrown away. Why keep a telephone book when its numbers are outdated?

More than fifty years later, I discovered there was actually a very good reason.

Before searching for my parents in the 1975 directory, I decided to test myself. Somewhere underneath all the passwords, PIN codes, access codes and security questions that occupy our brains today, I wondered whether four little numbers might still be hiding.

I wrote them down: 3699.

Then I searched. I was right.

There was my father's name, followed by our telephone number. What caught my attention was something else printed beside his name: lawyer. Apparently, someone compiling the directory thought occupations were useful information. The people listed immediately above and below him did not have professions mentioned, but my father did.

Then I found my grandfather's listing in San Nicolas. Another familiar name, another number, another little piece of my family's history sitting there quietly on a page from 1975.

So I kept looking.

When a Phone Book Starts Talking

I searched for the father of my good friend Arturo Saladin, who has since passed away. There he was too, with his profession beside his name: surgeon. And what a surgeon he was. By any measure, one of the finest Aruba has had.

At the bottom of one of the pages, I noticed something else: a banner-style advertisement for Kan Jewelers. Looking at it today, the format feels surprisingly familiar. Put it at the bottom of a website instead of at the bottom of a telephone directory page, and we would immediately recognize it as an online banner ad.

As I continued browsing, I noticed Kan appearing again on other pages. That made me smile. Many years later, when I started practicing law in 1998, my office was only a few doors away from René Kan, the jeweler's son, who became a respected friend and successful businessman in his own right. Looking back at those advertisements, it was clear that René's father already understood something every modern marketing expert knows: being in business is one thing, making sure people repeatedly see your name is another.

The technology changed. The advertising space moved from the bottom of a telephone book page to the bottom of a screen. The basic idea was already there.

By now I had stopped looking at the telephone directory merely as a telephone directory.

It had become a time capsule.

I began searching for family names, friends, businesses and places I remembered. There were restaurants such as Hong Kong Restaurant and Dragon Phoenix, names that will immediately trigger memories for many Arubans of a certain generation. I still remember entering Dragon Phoenix and seeing the large Buddha near the entrance. You rubbed his belly for good luck. These were not simply restaurants. They were part of Aruba's social life, places where people ate, met, talked, celebrated, and, undoubtedly, discussed plenty of politics.

The Aruba Between the Names

The directory also contained government information. You can browse those pages today and see who held public office, who served on the Island Council, and who represented Aruba when we were still part of the Netherlands Antilles. Information we now expect to find instantly on a government website was once printed in the front pages of the telephone book.

But sometimes what is missing from an old document tells us as much as what is printed in it.

I tried finding some of my aunts. I couldn't.

Most were married, and the household listing was generally under the husband's name. The women were there, of course. They were raising families, working, contributing, and building Aruba alongside everyone else. But you could not necessarily find them by searching their own names.

That old telephone directory therefore records not only how much has disappeared, but also how much has changed. Aruba changed. The position of women changed. Our laws changed. Our understanding of equality changed. Looking back should never require us to pretend that everything about the past was better. Some things were wonderful and deserve to be remembered. Other things needed to change, and thankfully they did.

When We Knew the Numbers

In 1975, four digits were enough.

If you wanted to call Tia Iris, Tia Nila, Tia Lena, Tio Dieguito, your doctor, the hospital, or someone's workplace, chances are you knew the number by heart. You picked up a rotary telephone and dialed four digits. If you did not know the number, you looked it up in the telephone book. And if that failed, you could call 118 and ask another human being to find it for you.

There was something different about the way we remembered information then. Today my phone contains hundreds of contacts. WhatsApp knows who I communicate with. Social media gives us multiple ways to reach the same person. Yet ask me to recite the telephone numbers of some of the people closest to me today, and I might struggle.

Ask me for my parents' telephone number from more than fifty years ago?

3699.

Over the years, Aruba grew, and those numbers grew with us. Four digits eventually became seven. Mobile telephones arrived. New providers arrived. Today a telephone is hardly just a telephone. It is our directory, camera, mailbox, newspaper, bank, office, and connection to much of the world.

But those four digits were once enough to connect one household to another.

When Mom Had the Key

The phone book also brought back memories that will never appear in an official history of Aruba.

Long before parents worried about screen time, passwords, or parental controls, my mother had her own very effective piece of technology: a little lock with a key that she could put on the telephone.

When that lock went on, that was it. No outgoing calls.

There was good reason for it. As I got older, I could spend what my mother considered an unreasonable amount of time talking to friends and running up the telephone bill. And, of course, there came an age when one particular telephone number became much more important than all the others.

I remember being madly in love and wanting to spend what seemed like endless hours on the telephone. The problem was that sometimes my phone was locked and hers was not. Sometimes mine was available, and hers was locked. So there you were, a teenager with butterflies in your stomach, desperately wanting to hear one particular voice, and somewhere between two households and two sets of parents, the entire telecommunications system had effectively shut you down.

Today, a teenager would probably find 17 alternative ways to make contact within 30 seconds. We had one. And sometimes Mom had the key.

And if, by some coincidence, the person who was once waiting at the other end of one of those impossible phone calls happens to read this column, I hope the memory brings at least a little smile to your face too.

From 3699 to a Different Aruba

There is another reason those telephone pages made me smile. Years after I sat as a little boy in a house reached by dialing those four digits, I became involved professionally in the struggle to open Aruba's telecommunications market.

Together with my good friend, brother, and law partner Andin Bikker, we spent years challenging the idea that mobile telecommunications should remain exclusively in the hands of a state-owned monopoly. At the heart of our legal argument was something remarkably simple: the right of people to send and receive signals.

We fought hard. The government fought back hard. Eventually the market opened, competition arrived, and Aruba's telecommunications world changed.

I consider that one of the professional achievements of which I remain most proud, not because of the litigation itself, but because of what it meant for the community. Looking now at those old telephone pages, I cannot help smiling at the coincidence. The little boy who once knew four digits by heart would one day spend years arguing about the right of Arubans to communicate through a more open telecommunications market.

The numbers grew from four digits to seven. Aruba grew too. Not in some perfect straight line, and certainly not without mistakes, but we built institutions, expanded opportunities, strengthened rights, adopted new technologies, and became increasingly connected with the world.

Those four digits were part of the Aruba we inherited. What came afterward was what successive generations built upon them.

Before Status Aparte

Perhaps this old telephone book also struck me differently because of the year in which I found it.

This year, together with Brechtje Huiskes, I co-edited 40 Jaar Status Aparte: Tussen voortgaan en stilstaan. That project invited us to look back at forty years of Status Aparte and reflect on where Aruba came from, where we stand today, and where we might be going.

Then this old telephone directory appeared on my screen, taking me even further back.

The Aruba captured in those pages was still more than a decade away from Status Aparte. Years later, becoming a separate country within the Kingdom would also mean establishing our own connections with the outside world. I remember hearing from Ángel Bermúdez, an older cousin of mine who served Aruba during those formative years, about the urgency of establishing Aruba's own telecommunications links with the world.

It is easy today to forget what it actually took to build a country. Status Aparte was not only constitutional documents, ceremonies, and political speeches. Institutions had to be created. Systems had to work. Communications had to function. Aruba had to be able to connect itself to the rest of the world.

In a strange way, that 1975 telephone directory captures an Aruba that did not yet know everything that was coming.

When Yesterday's Garbage Becomes History

Nobody produced that directory intending to write a history book. It was a practical object. People needed telephone numbers, so somebody printed them in a book. Businesses needed customers, so they bought advertisements. Government needed to provide information, so officials and institutions were listed.

Then the next year's directory arrived, and the 1975 edition became outdated. Eventually, most of us threw those old books away. They had served their purpose.

Except somebody understood that they were worth preserving.

For that, the National Archives of Aruba and those responsible for preserving and digitizing these materials deserve our gratitude. Archives preserve things before the rest of us understand why they might someday matter. What became useless for finding a telephone number eventually became invaluable for finding ourselves.

History does not always announce itself as it happens. Sometimes history is a constitutional document or an important political speech. Sometimes it is a photograph, a restaurant menu, an advertisement, or a newspaper clipping.

And sometimes it is an old telephone book that everybody thought was garbage.

See If You Remember

So I have a little challenge for you. Find the old telephone directory online and think of the house where you grew up, your grandparents, an aunt or uncle, or perhaps an old family business.

But before you search, if you are old enough, close your eyes.

See whether the number comes back.

Then search.

You may find a parent or grandparent. You may find an old address. You may discover a business you had completely forgotten. You may encounter the name of someone who is no longer with us. You may find a restaurant where your family celebrated birthdays, or an advertisement belonging to someone whose children and grandchildren you know today.

I went looking for 3699. I found my father's telephone number and, a little further along, my grandfather in San Nicolas. But somewhere between those numbers and the last page, I found pieces of the Aruba in which I grew up, the Aruba my parents and grandparents knew, the Aruba we changed and the Aruba on whose foundations we continue to build.

Four digits were enough to connect us then.

More than fifty years later, 3699 connected me all over again.

Thanks for reading. Catch you next column, and don’t forget to visit www.lincolngomez.com for all my latest blogs and podcasts.