Artifact: The Rolodex

Remembering a mentor and his rotating cards of access and connection

by Maribel Alvarez

When Dr. James “Big Jim” Griffith, a folklorist, a friend and mentor to me, and the beloved founder of the annual Tucson Meet Yourself Folklife Festival, passed away in December of 2021, his wife Loma invited friends and colleagues to pick small keepsakes from his home office as remembrances. I selected an out-of-print pamphlet on the Yaqui Easter ceremonies, a bumper sticker from Cananea, Sonora taped to one of his cabinets, and Jim’s personal Rolodex.

Before there were smart phones or a “cloud” to store all our contacts, people in need of organizing their “social network” relied on the Rolodex. The word itself, lower case “r,” has entered everyday English as a metaphor for connectivity.

A Rolodex is a rotating card file. Its primary use was to store business contact information. You could replace cards easily (no need to erase or scratch previous entries) and manage your entries as needed—no cards on X and double the cards for M. Some Rolodex users stapled business cards they’d received to the blank cards in the wheel, facilitating future searches in alphabetical order instead of fishing a sea of random cards in a drawer.

The Rolodex was invented in 1956 by Arnold Neustadter, who owned a stationary manufacturing company in Brooklyn, New York. Neustadter passed away in 1996 at 85. His surviving relatives described him as “the most organized man” they ever knew.[1]

His aversion to desk clutter led him to direct his employee, the Danish design engineer Hildaur Neilsen, to create a snap-on device to organize business contacts. Shortly after the product went public in 1958, its reputation grew beyond a pure clerical function. People began talking about the Rolodex as a symbol of business power. Who you knew and whose phone number you had mattered, and sometimes could make or break you .

“Access” became the new mantra of corporate America. This small metal box and its wheel of contacts was such an icon of “dealmaking” it became the centerpiece of several 1980s lawsuits: companies accusing  former employees of making off with the Rolodex when they left employment.[2]

When I picked up Jim’s Rolodex, I was not schooled on the details of corporate lore, but I knew enough about the significance and symbolism of the artifact in popular culture. I knew, too, that at the height of Jim’s career as a folklorist of the borderlands, his list of contacts became a golden asset that revealed human connections, trust, and respectability. I know Jim cherished his ability to establish links where none previously existed, especially among people who in the most practical ways needed each other. The outcomes were diverse—a gig booked, an instrument repaired, a call to ask about the origin of a word.

His Rolodex cards span from institutional folklore work to personal relations. One card lists the direct line to the (former) Director of Folk Arts at the National Endowment for the Arts. Another card, “Muralists,” lists three names and phone numbers, the celebrated Tucson muralist David Tineo who started going blind in 2004, at the top. There is a card for Jim’s friend and fellow local troubadour Bobby Benton and another for the famed Tucson-born Chicano music star Lalo Guerrero.

Jim’s is the heavy-duty corporate version, in brushed caramel-colored metal, sturdy and spacious enough to hold hundreds of entries. It is weather worn, as it should be as a tool of trade for a storyteller. Dust from Jim’s homestead near San Xavier Mission lingers still on its surface and crevices. I can only imagine the many times Jim opened this gadget to look up a name and number, to dream up some magic for a performance at Tucson Meet Yourself or to discuss a book project with a colleague.

I believe objects carry the energy of their caretakers far longer than the time they were used and well past the life of their users. I keep Jim’s Rolodex on a shelf in my office at the University of Arizona. Every so often I pull it down and look through the entries. Seeing my dear mentor’s handwriting, studying his annotations, and tracking changes in addresses or area codes deeply moves me. A lifetime of transactions and transformations is encoded in this wheel of cards.

Surprisingly, the Rolodex is still manufactured and sold in the United States, although only a smaller and lighter version than the original. I can’t imagine who uses one now.

Still, I am reminded that objects—even those whose purpose has always been, in part, to hook us into believing productivity and efficiency are marks of our value—are indeed more than an assembly of materials and convenience. They are also often reminders our connectivity, our here-ness. Jim’s Rolodex bespeaks the density of encounters that made life in the Sonoran Desert worth living.

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[1] Hampson, Rick. “Rolodex Inventor Dead at 85.” AP News, April 19, 1996.

[2] Grossman, Anna Jane. “The Life and Death of the Rolodex.” Gizmodo, March 20, 2010.

Dr. Maribel Alvarez holds the Jim Griffith Chair in Public Folklore at the Southwest Center, University of Arizona. She has held positions at the University of Arizona as Associate Dean for Community Engagement in the College of Social & Behavioral Sciences and as Associate Provost for Diversity and Inclusion. Maribel is the founder of and senior advisor at the Southwest Folklife Alliance in Tucson and has served as Senior Director of Tucson Meet Yourself Folklife Festival since 2010. In 2018, the American Folklore Society awarded her the prestigious Americo Paredes Prize for “excellence in integrating scholarship and engagement with the people and communities one studies.” She is editor-in-chief of BorderLore.