Worldwide Yellow Pages

In Europe they're the Golden Pages. In Australia they're the Pink Pages. Both were launched by John W. Berry '44, son of the man who founded the profitable telephone directory known in America and through-out most of the world as the Yellow Pages.

Loren Murphy Berry started (he company in 1909 by selling $700 of advertising for his uncle's phone company's directory in Marion, Indiana. By the time son John sold the business to Bell South in 1986, sales were more than $1 billion a year. Loren brought the Yellow Pages to the nation; John took it to the world. In 1966, after assuming the company's presidency, John started a joint venture with the International Telephone & Telegraph Company to create ITT-World Directories. Within five years the group was managing the advertising for 125 directories in 17 countries from Israel to Peru.

The result was more than a successful business; it was a sociologist's dream. As Loren Berry himself put it, "From the days of fire patrols, of segars and saloons, through wagon works and livery stables to rockets, computers, and lasers, Yellow Pages has narrated the story of man." Today people let their fingers do the walking 16 billion times a year in the Yellow Pages (which, by the way, are colored yellow in most places because it makes the small black type stand out better).

Berry let his fingers do global walking.