The AAAAA List

Column one of the 1996 Greater Los Angeles Pacific Bell Business White Pages is a cacophony of freakish and fantastic company names--many of them fictitious, all of them heavily front-loaded with the first letter of the alphabet. The three opening entries are simply the letter A, followed by such flights of fancy as A Aall Harmony Moving & Storage, A-Aabacadabra chimney sweeps and A Aaable Professional Services. While most of these businesses have assumed aliases not for top placement in the White Pages but to secure a privileged berth in the Yellow Pages under, say, Movers or Chimney and Fireplace Services, some heartfelt justifications nevertheless emerge:

A

“We really aren’t so much a low-end secretarial service,” says Mel Barosay, president of Career Launch Resumes. “We’re more of a high-end rsum writing service.” Since many neophytes can’t tell the difference, Barosay has considerately listed his company under its solitary letter so that even oblivious callers might stumble upon him first. “We’re looking basically to use the A feature to get the first phone call from the client in the Yellow Pages,” Barosay avows.

A Engineering and Surveying, Inc.

No base desire for Yellow Pages preeminence motivated manager Bernarr Reiss when he settled on the name A for his engineering and surveying company. “We felt A is like supreme or paramount,” Reiss says. “We thought we were the best, so we used the letter A.” Although Reiss lists the concern’s street address next to the letter A in his entry, the clarification hasn’t stopped extraneous callers. “We get garden-variety curiosity seekers,” he says. “It’s not hard to set them straight.”

A Aaaaa Bcalvy 24-Hour Carpet, Fire, Water & Odor Damage Clean Up Owner Bill Calvy was content to name his 24-hour general contracting and cleanup company after himself--that is, until he discovered the advantageous Yellow Pages position offered by renaming it A Bill Calvy. Then his competitors began upping the ante. “There were people who would put two A’s in front of their names, then three,” he explains. “You’d start getting buried beneath the A’s, so you’d put A’s in front of your name, too.” Which is how the relatively straightforward A Bill Calvy mutated into today’s daunting A Aaaaa Bcalvy.

A Abbaa International Lock & Key

Properly pronounced, Greg Seymour’s mobile locksmith business begins with the quasi-Middle Eastern plaint of ay-ay-bee-bah. Greg’s father, actor Dan Seymour, played a small role in “Casablanca,” and perhaps that experience served as inspiration when his son asked him to dream up a name for the company in the early 1970s. Another explanation might be found in earlier family history--Greg’s grandfather had a custom furniture business called A Able in Chicago, rechristened E Excel when the clan moved to Los Angeles.

A Aabby the Plumber Inc.

As teenagers, Jack Spath and his good friend Aabbie shared some grand adventures together--hitchhiking across the country, bumming around their native Colorado. When Spath relocated to the Southland and was mulling over a name for his plumbing business, he was visited by the memory of his friend and the strange spelling of his moniker. “That gave me the idea,” Spath says, “but it wasn’t necessarily named after him.” In the 28 years since launching A Aabby, Spath started air-conditioning, heating and electrical enterprises with names like AAero and Aaren, but those have all since folded, and Spatz pledges he will make no further efforts to overpopulate the first page of the phone book.