Who Owns a Rolodex These Days?

Hansel Post

There was a time when a good Rolodex said something about the person who owned it. It wasn't just a spinning wheel of index cards with names and phone numbers. It was years, sometimes decades, of relationships someone had taken the trouble to keep alive.

The people who were good at it knew birthdays, anniversaries, and the names of spouses and kids. They wrote notes by hand and picked up the phone for no particular reason, so a call from them never felt strange when they finally needed something. If you were headed to a city you didn't know, they knew someone there. If your kid was curious about a college or a career, somebody on one of those cards had already been down that road. The relationship existed long before the request, and that's what made the request easy.

I've been thinking about this all week, mostly because two unrelated events showed me how far I've let some of my own relationships drift.

The first was news from Lexington, Massachusetts. The high school football program that shaped so much of my teenage years is struggling to field a varsity team. I wanted to reach the former teammates, coaches, and alumni who might care as much as I do. Some of them played alongside me nearly fifty years ago. Others came through before or after my time, and a few have built careers that put them in a real position to help. I knew those people were out there. I just didn't have a good way to find them.

Then, this morning, I learned that a woman I'd known since high school had died. We'd shared a long connection over the years, and we hadn't spoken in almost twenty. I found myself thinking about who should hear the news, people who would understand why the loss mattered because they'd lived that chapter with me. Once again I realized I'd made something simple much harder than it needed to be.

Fifty years ago, I might have been better equipped to do this than I am today.

I carry a phone that can reach almost anyone on the planet in seconds. I've got email, text, Facebook, LinkedIn, and a contacts app that will hold photos, birthdays, reminders, and groups for as many people as I care to enter. I still couldn't pull together a list of the people I shared some of the most important years of my life with.

I think we've confused being connected with keeping up a relationship. A birthday reminder from Facebook or a job-change alert from LinkedIn feels like contact, but a notification isn't a relationship. More often than I'd like to admit, I've let the technology do the remembering and skipped the part where I'm supposed to act on what it remembers.

The person with a good Rolodex had a discipline around people. They noticed when someone's daughter graduated because they'd been paying attention all year, and that's why a note from them after a funeral felt natural instead of forced. Some of that was surely good business. The ones who did it best understood something more basic. Relationships need tending, and the worst time to start is the moment you need one.

It also ran in both directions. The same cards that held people who could help you held people you might be able to help. A former colleague's kid might need an internship, or an old friend might be moving to a city where you know someone. Sometimes a young person just needs twenty minutes with someone who has spent thirty years doing what that young person hopes to do. The more connections you made, the more the whole network was worth to everyone in it.

I know this from the receiving end. In the spring of 1981, I was at Bridgton Academy in Maine when a West Point recruiter reached me on the pay phone. He told me Coach Bill Tighe, my football coach at Lexington, had called me "the sleeper of the East." Tighe helped open a door I didn't know was there. No app made that call possible. A coach who knew me well enough to vouch for me did, and that relationship was in place long before I had any idea I'd need it.

This week I got a look at it from the other end. On Tuesday, a text came in: "Duey. This still you? John Bougon here." That's John Paul Bougon. I started coaching him when he was 11, after his mother had asked just about everyone to take him on and I was the one who finally said yes. He was texting a number he wasn't sure still belonged to me, which is about as close to an old Rolodex card as it gets. "Still me, Big Man!" I wrote back. "It's been a long time," he answered. When we got on the phone, he told me he's a dad now, with a 10-year-old son and a 7-year-old daughter, and he'd come across something I wrote about coaching and parenting my three daughters. It hit home, and he knew he had to reach me. That complicates my argument a little. My writing reached him through the same feeds I've been complaining about. But the feed only reminded him I was out there. The reason to send the text was built more than thirty years earlier. For the record, we talked for an hour and I never got around to asking about his parents.

I've spent most of my professional life building organizations and developing people, and I know what happens when important information lives only in one person's head. I've built systems to track player development, organizational performance, and the smallest details of how people learn. I never built a decent one for the relationships in my own life. That's an uncomfortable thing for a systems guy to admit.

And there's a harder reason to fix it. Someday I'm going to die.

I don't say that for drama. It's a fact that gets harder to ignore as the years pile up. When that day comes, how will anyone know who to call? Some of the people who mattered most haven't been part of my daily life in decades. A few live thousands of miles away, and others probably couldn't find me anymore. None of that means they stopped mattering. Would my daughters know which old teammates should hear the news, or which friends from my early coaching years in Atlanta and Charlotte? Probably not. Whose responsibility is that? Mine.

We put real effort into organizing what we leave behind. We write wills, name beneficiaries, and make sure someone knows where the important papers are. Very few of us organize the relationships. The people who knew us before our kids did are keepers of parts of our lives, holding stories and versions of us that may not exist anywhere else. If our families can't find them, our kids may never hear those stories.

I don't want to romanticize the past. Plenty of people had Rolodexes full of names they never called, the same way people today have thousands of Facebook friends they barely know. A thoughtful text can mean as much as a handwritten letter. The tool was never the point. If anything, the phones in our pockets should make us better at this than any generation before us. What's missing is the discipline to use them.

For me, that starts with organizing the people in my life the way I should have years ago, writing down who they are, where our lives crossed, and why it mattered. It means reaching out when something important happens in their lives instead of waiting for something to happen in mine, making introductions, and sending the occasional note for no reason at all. It also means leaving my daughters something they can use to understand the people who mattered to their father, including a few they've never met.

I can't get back the years I let slip. Some of those overdue phone calls have no one left to answer them.

Maybe the value of a Rolodex was never the names. It was what the names stood for, relationships somebody cared enough to keep. I'd rather start rebuilding mine now than leave my daughters wondering who should have been in it.