In 1987 my main character found a boy's phone number by working down a column in the White Pages and calling every house with his last name

I published a novel a few years ago set in the summer of 1987 on Long Island, and the scene readers bring up the most is the smallest one in the whole book. A girl wants to call a boy. She does not have his number. She has his last name and the town he lives in, and that is it. So she pulls the White Pages off the shelf, finds the column of everyone with that last name, and starts calling houses one at a time until somebody's mother hands the phone to the right kid.

I had forgotten how much nerve that actually took until I sat down to write it. You had to be willing to talk to a stranger's parent first. You had to hope you had the spelling right. And when you finally got the right house, you had about two seconds to sound normal. In the book, she finds him on the third try, tells him twenty minutes, and shows up in twenty.  

Did anyone else really do this, or have it done to you? I want to know if my memory is romanticizing it, or if it truly was that nerve-wracking.

For anyone asking, this is from my novel Last Exit to Montauk.

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