Throwback Thursday: Want to Call Obama at Home? You Could in 2002

Remember phone books?

Back in the day, people used them to find the phone numbers of businesses or private citizens. They were a big deal. Honest.

In some cases, you could even find the home number of a sitting state senator and future US president. Like Barack Obama.

That's what one worker discovered after uncovering a 2002 Chicago phone book while rehabbing a building in Hyde Park recently. The worker posted a photo of the Obamas' listing to Reddit on Wednesday.

In 2002, Barack and Michelle Obama lived in a four-bedroom condo in East View Park, a gated community in Hyde Park near 54th Street and Lake Shore Drive, while Barack was representing Illinois' 13th District. They didn't move to their Kenwood house until 2005.

"A lot of people don't realize what a regular guy Obama was before his speech at the 2004 convention. Just four years prior he had his credit card denied trying to rent a car for the 2000 convention," another Redditor wrote in the thread. "I attended the [University of Chicago] as undergrad when he was a law professor there. I had a job of checking IDs for Henry Crown (the primary gym at the time), and would sometimes chat with him while also grabbing him a towel. (Faculty could get a towel for free.)

"Always down to earth. He'd sometimes look at the textbooks of whatever we were studying & chat about it. It was never long, never more than a minute or two, but he knew our names which was more than 80% of the people who came in."