Maps have a magical ability to allow one to travel to places they have and have not been to.  They offer an experiential taste.  From the late 1920’s until the 1970’s, would-be travelers had options to pick up road maps at no cost from various gasoline stations around the US.  My favorites as a child – and even now – fell to those produced by the H. M. Gousha Maps.  Vibrant colors accompanied by bright fonts set the maps as a peak for other map companies to reach for in my eyes.

ROAD MAP BEGINNINGS

Map collectors talk of the Big Three, a group of three map publishing companies producing most road maps during the heydays of free road maps.  The map world tree begins and ends with Rand McNally, however.

RAND MCNALLY

William Rand spent some of his younger years journeying from his home in Massachusetts where he served as an apprentice in his brother’s Boston print shop.  Settling in Los Angeles in late 1849, Rand helped co-found the first newspaper in the town, the Los Angeles Star.  His time with the Star lasted only a few months – November1851 to November – before he sold his interest in the paper.  By 1856, Rand had enough of the Far West returning first to Boston and then to Chicago where he opened a print shop in June.

Two years after opening his print shop, an Irish immigrant, Andrew McNally, found work alongside Rand.    A lot of work for the shop came from the Chicago Press & Tribune, today’s Chicago Tribune.  By 1859, the two men were running the Tribune’s whole printing operation.

By 1868, Rand, McNally and Rand’s nephew, George Amos Poole, formalized Rand McNally & Co..  The company became eventually the largest map publisher though maps did not figure strongly in the business in the beginning.  Initially, the company focused on printing tickets and timetables for the Chicago railroad industry.  Railroad guides, business directories and an illustrated weekly newspaper came next.  The first map appeared in the December 1872 edition of their Railroad Guide.  A Business Atlas followed in 1876 – still updated today as the Commercial Atlas & Marketing Guide.  The next year saw a Trade Book department established, followed in 1880 by the first maps, globes, geography textbooks and a world atlas.

mAPS COME TO THE FORE

The company opened a New York office in 1894 with Caleb S. Hammond in control.  The New Automobile Road Map of New York & Vicinity became the firm’s first road map.  One of the company’s draftsman, John Brinks, earned a $100 bonus for instituting a number system onto both maps and signs along roads.  His 1916 idea eventually caught on at a federal level leading to the uniform highway marking system instituted by the National Highway System in 1926.

Maps began to take on new importance in the publishing world as the oil industry looked for ways to get Americans out on the roads, consuming more gasoline as they explored.  Rand McNally published road maps for Gulf Oil beginning in 1920.  The maps saw free distribution at Gulf service stations.

COMPETITION

Even before the new influx of oil money into map publishing, Rand McNally served to promote employees to branch out on their own.  George Poole, one of the four original founders of Rand McNally, got together with his brother in the late 19^th century to form Poole Brothers & Co..  They competed with Rand McNally for lucrative railroad business.  Their first map was an 1880 map of Yellowstone National Park.

Rand McNally’s New York manager, Caleb Hammond split from the company in 1900 beginning a new printing company in Brooklyn.  Incorporated a year later, the map making firm eventually rose to become second largest publisher of maps in the US behind Rand McNally.

ENTER GOUSHA

The main road map publishing rival to Rand McNally also came from within.  Harry Mathais Gousha worked as a young sales executive for the big publishing firm in Chicago.  Gousha was a successful salesman and soon attracted contracts from the oil companies, undercutting his competition along the way.  In making his leap to independence, he attracted some of the young draftsmen from Rand McNally to join him. 

One of those men, Matt Heimbold, recalled in an interview, “At the same time, they hired two others besides me from Rand. We all gave notice in the morning and at noontime, we got notice to leave the building, but quick!”  His description of Gousha, “You had a lot of confidence in him. He was a very small man, couldn’t have weighed any more than 130 pounds. Very active. He knew a lot of people around Chicago. There was an occasion where he took several of us out to dinner and everybody knew him as Harry. And of course, in the prohibition days, he was able get anything he wanted.” 

Heimbold also noted a high degree of animosity between Gousha’s new company and the parent Rand McNally.  Something similar already occurred when Hammond left to start his new firm.  C.S. Hammond & Company moved from Manhattan to a warehouse in Mapletown, New Jersey, close to Hammond’s home.  Rand McNally spitefully refused to include Mapletown on their maps.

HEYDAY FOR GOUSHA

The 1930’s proved hard on many people, but the young company thrived with new orders.  “During the Depression was our busiest years. We were making new maps, better maps. By then, many of the counties made county maps for source material. The oil companies were promoting travel and they wanted maps, and better maps. During the daytime, we expanded to about thirty or forty people working, and I had thirty-seven to forty men working for me at night. We were trying constantly to improve our maps with better source material.”

Working hard and sometimes playing hard became the mantra at Gousha.  “…Gousha would take us to this club and we had the run of the club and we all enjoyed ourselves. Next day was all work. On Christmas Eve, we had our party starting at ten o’clock in the morning, lasted all day. The mailman come in…come out wobbly. I remember the janitor telling me after one Christmas party he found 35 empty bottles of liquor. And there were about fifteen employees at that time! …so we did a pretty good job of it.”

CHANGE IN MANAGEMENT

Gousha served as a good salesman, but as a businessman, the company always seemed to be operating on the edge.  Heimbold remembers, “. Again, Gousha spent too much money and was going broke. That was when – Robert R.- Erving came in. Erving was in charge of the salesmen at Rand McNally before Gousha came in but left in the early 20s to start a thrift company. Erving bought shares of Gousha and got other outside investments and additional capital and the company was solvent. He became controller of the company.”

Erving and Gousha enjoyed a long relationship with each other.  Erving, as a Rand McNally sales manager, hired Harry Gousha into the map business as Rand McNally’s Pittsburgh area sales rep in 1918.  in the early 1920’s, Erving left Rand McNally to take another job outside of the publishing industry with Gousha taking his position.

CHANGE IN LOCATION

By late 1940, Erving assumed 100% control of the company – Gousha continued on as a consultant.  Erving became interested in the San Jose California area after seeing a symbol for the Alviso Harbor Yacht Club on a Gousha map of southern San Francisco Bay.  An ardent Lake Michigan yachtsman, he became curious about this particular club. A business trip took him to the Bay Area in 1945 and he fell in love with the entire area.  He bought a home in Los Altos moved the entire company from Chicago the following year.  H.M. Gousha remained in San Jose until the company became part of the Times Mirror Company.  Much of the production was moved to Comfort, Texas to gain lower costs.

BEAUTY IN A ROAD MAP

What about those beautiful Gousha maps?  Who was most responsible for the way the maps looked? Who decided upon symbology and fonts? Heimbold recounted, Well we got together…when we first started, it was Miles, Harry Gousha,…we’d make up a little sample to show how it would look. Of course, in later years, it was the responsibility of myself as the Chief Draftsman.”   He also had this to say in his closing remarks, “… making maps back in those days is much different than today…everything was hand-drawn, and it took skilled people to do it. A lot of patience, discipline, good eyesight.”

Not all Gousha maps are as colorful as the majority.  Many of the earlier maps, like Rand McNally, were a little lacking in color compared to later.  Gousha also added shaded relief to some of their maps as time went along adding depth in times prior to Google Earth. Another online commenter agrees with my preference for the Gousha style, “I wish that Gousha maps were still in business.  There is no comparison to the crap that Rand McNally puts out year after year.  I like the detail they put into even a common road map, like with the elevations important in the western states).”

COLLECTIONS

In my childhood, I came into a collection of road maps collected by my grandparents over the years.  Most maps dated back to the 1950’s, but a couple were earlier.  There were maps from Rand McNally, Universal, State Highway Departments, as well as Gousha. I have since seen that I was far from alone in enjoying collecting road maps. There is a group for everything with special niches on the world-wide web. Road maps, seem no different.

Alas, that collection, like a nice sports card collection became the victims of house consolidation, discarded by someone over the years I was off to universities and the Army.  To see the maps of the same area over the years was to witness, first-hand, a revolution in transportation and culture.  Cities and States changed with each map.

RIVALRY GETS OUT OF LINE

One question asked of Heimbold was there ever an attempt to make a Gousha map look like a Rand?  “No. There was a standing order…if anybody had a Rand McNally map on their desk, they were fired. They had some Rand McNally maps in the front office to look at, but in the drafting department, creative department; no Rand McNally maps.”

Rand McNally, on the other hand … “Was there ever an effort to make Rand maps look like Gousha?” Heimbold replied, “Yes. … Tom Kirk was assigned …, and I helped him out to some degree, showing where Rand McNally copied information from our maps…about five or six maps. And they were going to sue Rand McNally. But it never got to a lawsuit ‘cause Gousha and Erving got together with Andrew McNally and showed him where they copied different things from our maps. We had a system of putting fake names on a map, every map had maybe a dozen, or we changed the alignment of a road or river.”  The lawsuit was resolved for $200,000 – $3.3 million in today’s dollars – and kept quiet.  “Employees never found if a settlement was made….it was just…everything dropped. When Erving came in there, it was ‘leave us alone, we’ll leave you alone’.”

The friction between the two companies abated somewhat after the plagiarism discovery.  Though eventually, in 1996, the circle became full.  H.M. Gousha Company was purchased by Rand McNally.  The San Jose and Comfort offices were shuttered. 

WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN?

I remember reading about the purchase at the time with the forlorn hope the Gousha-style could be incorporated into the Rand McNally maps, but the signature Gousha map style became lost to time.  Rand McNally, at the time, was still a family-run business with a fourth-generation McNally running the company.  Rand held onto the original presidency of the company until he retired in 1899, moving back to his Massachusetts roots.  He sold his shares to the McNally family at that time.  The family-maintained control over the next century.  Finally, one year after finally eliminating their main rival, the family began to sell off units of their company.  The map publishing unit sold last in November 1997 for $500 million. 

Rand McNally has undergone several changes in the last 25 years.  The gas crisis of the 1970’s put an end to free road maps.  Paper maps in this century have taken a rough beating from GPS apps.  Those apps dumb down people’s ability to read maps while making it easier to know where they are going.  When driving in new areas – especially in Europe where if you miss your turn, it is usually not a simple matter of going around the block and trying again – the need for a map-reading navigator is mitigated, today.

David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries