IIRC even further back in the late '70's or early '80's there was a glossy color magazine put out by Bearcat I believe. Thinking back, that time period was what I consider the "golden age of scanning" the first programmable scanners were coming out, so you could easily tune around and find the new ones without having to have a drawer full of xtals <grin>. Most of us had a 10 or 20 channel xtal scanner that we used to monitor the local stuff - PD's, Fire, etc. and then used the programmable ones for finding the new ones. I can remember one of my friends and myself (we both worked at the Sheriff's Office BTW) going about once a month to the FCC office in Kansas City to search the microfiche to identify who was licensed for a particular frequency that we intercepted. Most of the public safety stuff we could verify by either looking it up in Police Call or (given our jobs) making a discrete call to the agency.
Dennis
