OK, wow, sometimes I forget how freakin' YOUNG some folks are here.
Once upon a time, last century (like mid-century), there was a thing called the Classified Advertising section of the newspaper. People placed ads in it to buy/sell cars, dogs, furniture, garden equipment, whatever; companies placed employment ads seeking workers; legal notices were placed by companies and/or attorneys; landlords placed ads for apartments to rent, realtors placed ads for houses for sale. You get the drift?
There was also a "Personals" column. This could be anything from messages to friends ("Joe, please call Annabelle"), novenas (long prayers to Jesus, Mary the Mother of Jesus, various saints, asking for their help, no, I'm not making this up), and so on. And from this evolved, eventually, a column for dating. The name of the column varied from newspaper to newspaper. Ours was called The Meeting Place.
Most papers divided this up into "Men seeking Women" and "Women seeking Men." Some of them eventually added same-sex headings. You gave a little info about yourself (no photos) and what kind of person you were looking for, and replies could be sent to a mailbox at the paper, which then sent them on to you (without opening them thank god, the envelopes were just put into a bigger envelope to mail it to you).
Your mom was correct, it wasn't that different from online dating, just more cumbersome because it involved calling in the ad (don't even ask), mailing it in, or eventually placing it online where it had to be vetted to weed out the explicit stuff (double-don't-even-ask).
Weeding out the creeps was on you. I have no idea what the success rate of this sort of thing might have been.
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