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When conflicting road signs confused
this couple on a highway near Denver,
Colorado,they referred to a map made by
General Drafting to solve their dilemma.
continued on page 49
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MAP MAKER for millions For thirty-seven years free road maps produced by Otto Lindberg's General Drafting Company have been a boon to countless Americans traveling at home and abroad.
By ARTHUR W BAUM
A man I like is Otto Gustave Lindberg, a silver-haired pink-cheeked cherub with a frequent smile, a stubborn underlip and a flinty mind. He is seventy-four years old. He is a draftsman; the firm proprietor and almost sole owner of a company of some 200 people. Lindberg is a hugely successful man, not perhaps in the industrial-titan sense, but in the fact that if he had his life to live all over again he would not change a step of it. Only a successful man can say to his secretary, as Otto Lindberg often does, "Isn't this a wonderful business?" or "My, but this is fascinating work. I'm so glad to be here."
Lindberg has the blue eyes of a sea captain, the precise speech of one to whom English is an acquired language, and a voice lilt that says "Scandinavia." He was born a Finn, although the event took place in Russia, and he grew up In the Swedish language, not uncommon in Finland. He has been an American for forty- three years and until her death in 1958 had been married for forty-seven years to Edith Allen, descendant of the Green Mountain patriot, Ethan Allen. They had two sons. The youngest was lost in World War II; the eldest is second in command of his father's business. Lindberg lives in a pocket-size Buckingham Palace at Mountainside, New Jersey, and his office is a bedroom in a castle, a replica of sixteenth-century Compton Wynyates in Warwickshire, England.
None of these facts has much bearing on why I admire Otto Lindberg. As an acquaintance I approve what I know of him. I am sure he would make a durable friend, for his record is full of long and loyal friendships. But even if he were detestable I would still like him, because Otto Lindberg makes road maps and I am a long-standing and incurable road-map buff. I react to road maps like a patellar ligament to a test hammer.
It is the contention of road-map makers that there is more information in a square inch of a modern road map, than in any other equal area of printed matter; that if one picture is worth a thousand words, one road map is worth a thousand pictures. I don't know about that. Nor do I understand the loftier kind of map fanciers who form cartographic societies and collect ancient maps. Let the cartographers have Anaximander and Ptolemy, with all their quaint inaccuracies. My kick is an up-to- date, accurate, free automobile road map.
What grabs me is a thin line, a charted squiggle that runs from that place to that other place. If it is a-line along which I have traveled, the sight of it triggers a pleasant retrospection. If it is not such a line, I am a little saddened, because here is a road that I have never seen and probably never shall.
There are so many roads. The oil companies which give away these meaningful folded papers should love me. I am their patsy. They want me to burn gasoline, and I am an eager victim of their subtlety. I spend enjoyable hours poring over their bait. It hurts me to throwaway an old map, and I seldom do. For twenty years I have kept a complete portfolio of state and major - city maps once published by Shell Oil. I have a couple of long Conoco routings older than that. On a thoroughly beaten-up old United States map I habitually fill in the roads that I have covered. It looks like a drunkard's cheeks.
My hero, Otto Lindberg, is one of the causes of my affliction. So are Mr. Rand, Mr. McNally and Mr. H. M. Gousha. The Rand McNally and Gousha companies make more maps than Lindberg, whose corporate form is the General Drafting Company of Convent Station, New Jersey. General Drafting is a close third among these big three road-map makers. The G.D. annual output is about 36,000,000 maps. All map makers together produce from 150,000,000 to 200,000,000 road maps a year-no one quite knows how many. General Drafting, however, has now, and has had for thirty-seven years, what is very likely the biggest and best customer in the road-map field, Standard Oil of New Jersey and its affiliated companies. In those thirty-seven years the Esso family has distributed more than 300,000,000 free road maps.
General Drafting is no map-making mouse. It also provides maps for Standard Oil of Kentucky, Esso's largest petroleum customer. For these two marketers, General Drafting maps all the East and Gulf coasts clear around through Texas (Humble Oil) and Mexico. In addition there are maps for affiliates in the Pacific Northwest (Carter) and at least three dozen foreign countries. Lindberg will not publish a map for any competitor of these clients. "We can," he says, "make only one best map."
The free road map available at filling stations is more than half as old as the automobile itself. It has spread abroad now, but for many years it was a peculiarly American institution. It was born in Pittsburgh in 1914 as a map of Allegheny County. William Akin, a motorist who tired of losing his way, prepared the map and it was given away at the brand-new and only service station of a small refining company. The small refining company, Gulf, has since grown a bit.
No one knows to what degree the availability of good free maps has fostered travel on American roads. Their impact must have been tremendous. Certainly the old blazed-trail systems of colored bands on telephone poles could never have stimulated the travel or achieved the universal penetration of American life that the road map has. And the cost has been small. Less than a gallon of gas per year will pay for your share of the country's road maps. General Drafting's volume maps bring six to seven cents each, and the company's entire business, even though it is the third-largest producer, amounts to only about $3,000,000 a year. A million road maps can be had for less than the price of many single television shows.
Familiar as it is, the American road map remains to many people a slight mystery, which includes how to fold it. It folds exactly like an accordion. The gulf that sometimes occurs between what the map is trying to say and what gets through to the map reader is often very great. General Drafting once published a cartoon pointedly caricaturing one small instance of this lack of rapport. A wife, scanning a road map as her husband drives along, is saying, "Let's go on to Cleveland. It's only another inch and a half."
To illustrate the knowledge a map can impart General Drafting uses a two-inch square of one of its state maps. Within that small area are thirteen separate categories of information and, of course, many times that number of specific facts. There are still motorists, however, who miss such obvious things as the cod- ing system of Federal highways. United States highways running east-west carry even numbers. These numbers start low across the northern part of the country (U.S. 2 and 10) and rise as they reach the southern border, with U.S. 90 our most southern east-west transcontinental road. United States highways that run north-south carry uneven numbers, which are lowest in the East (U.S. 1) and rise in the West up to U.S. 99 and 101 up and down the West Coast. The new interstate network will reverse these patterns. If you wake up and find yourself on Interstate 5, you'll be on the Pacific Coast. Interstate 95 will run up and down the Atlantic Coast, Interstate 10 across the South and Interstate 90 across the North. We owe the simplicity of road numbering to Wisconsin, which started a number system in 1918.
The map business uncovers the sometimes appalling geographical blind spots of citizens concerning the country in which they live. Most frequently these deficiencies show up at touring bureaus, where inquirers appear in person to collect free maps and information. General Drafting operates seven of these bureaus, the oldest of which is thirty-four years, and six of the seven are under Esso family names; one is for Kentucky Standard. Three are out of the country, in Toronto, Paris, Brussels.
In addition to maps the bureaus dispense leaflets on points of interest, advice on travel, state and foreign auto regulations, campground locations, currency differences, gas taxes, and speed laws. They do not venture into the dangerous field of lodging and eating-place recommendations, but do make available standard lists at bureau offices. In a normal year General Drafting bureaus will service more than 1,500,000 requests for 3,000,000,000 miles of travel. Bureau personnel, so they may have as much firsthand knowledge of their maps as possible, enjoy subsidized vacations if they spend them on the road.
Most route requests are sent in on post cards available at service stations for that purpose. These are usually straightforward applications for maps and routes via the fastest, most scenic or best roads. But even on post cards some inquirers stray slightly off the straight- travel beam. "We are taking along our son, Howard, who is two years old!" . . . "I am trailering some cows from Minnesota to Louisiana. Would you please mark the route with the cows in mind."
Requests have been received for a route from New York to Seattle and "west from there to San Diego." Motorists want routes from one coast to the other "which will not cross any mountains." Some say, "I am afraid of traffic. Can you route me entirely on back roads?" An oil company once had an actual request for an auto route to Europe. Heart cases often specify that they must not travel above certain elevations, sometimes so low that it is impossible to get them 100 miles from home. There is occasional backtalk from customers of this free service. An inquirer wrote with some bitterness that while she had asked for a route going 200 miles from her home town to another northeast of it, she had been sent the routing on a map titled "Southeast United States," and she considered this a double cross.
A man once stepped up to a bureau counter asking about routes into and out of Canada. He showed particular interest in regulations applying to wives crossing the line and what Customs would want
know about women. Finally, to make his interest clear, he explained, "You see, she isn't my wife, and I don't want any trouble."
A legal husband, on the other hand, made a strange request for the best possible roads to the border of Mississippi and the worst possible roads from the state line to the family's destination within the state. "My wife's from Mississippi," he said, "and she's always bragging about it. If you can give us some bad driving once we cross the line, maybe she'll shut up about Mississippi."
Approximately every seventh inquirer asks for something more than just map and route. The New York bureau, oldest and largest, is not likely to forget the tweedy outdoor type who wanted a route to Boston which had the most sidewalks along it. "I'm on a walking tour," she explained, "and while I won't be using your gasoline, I'll be a steady customer of your rest rooms."
Easterners venturing west for the first time sometimes speak quite apprehensively about the possibility of "running into any Indians." But the West has no monopoly of road hazards. After a notorious murder by a hitchhiker on an East Coast road, a cautious map seeker suggested that the touring bureau plan his trip on roads "where there aren't any murderers." The map makers are definitely on the side of the law. When a family emergency made it imperative to locate a motorist following a route planned by a bureau, the driver's probable location was worked out and state police of that area promptly intercepted him.
Within the last two years one of the bureaus had a touching visit from a middle-aged lady. She approached the counter and hesitantly presented a worn, twelve-year-old map. "Would it be possible for me to exchange my map for a new one," she asked, "and would there be any charge?"
One of the great road-map curiosities is the fact that, with an enormous increase in road travel in the last twenty years, the number of maps printed and distributed has grown comparatively little. One reason is map control. Today's suppliers keep service-station inventories down and hold to a minimum any carryover of old maps when a new edition is ready for issuance-something that happens once a year for most domestic maps.
There are other reasons. State police formerly used quantities of oil-company maps, but most states now have their own official maps-General Drafting prepares a few of them. Hitchhikers are no longer welcome to maps, since hitchhiking is now frequently illegal. And turnpike riders often need only a turnpike map, which most toll-road people themselves provide and which also may be a General Drafting product. Area maps more and more substitute for individual state maps. During the Florida season approximately 50 per cent of inquiries at the New York Esso bureau are for routes to Florida. A special single map has been prepared for this route. It is upside down, with Florida at the top, enabling the driver to read upward in the direction in which he is traveling. What he does on the way home is presumably his own business.
It is also possible that motorists keep maps longer than they formerly did. For a free and inexpensive product, a map is cherished to an unusual degree. The sight of a discarded map in a trash basket is rare. Discarding one is like throwing away your state or your country. Think of all the marvels that exist on the paper! And oddities too. Have you ever seen the western tip of Kentucky? It is not physically a part of Kentucky at all. It can only, be reached through Tennessee or Missouri, by land, water or air. Did you know that a piece of mainland Minnesota was lost in Canada? It is a spur on the edge of Lake of the Woods, and to reach it you must go by plane or boat, or through Manitoba. And when you get there you will be at the northernmost point of continental United States. If you are a Westerner, can you conceive of driving out of one state, through two others and into a fourth state in a span of only twenty-two miles? Take U. S. 522 north from the tip of Virginia. As a bonus the half-hour trip will take you through the town of Omps, West Virginia.
Last year General Drafting celebrated its fiftieth birthday, while the oil industry was celebrating its hundredth. After all this time Otto Lindberg has about caught up to me in map devotion, but originally he was not a map lover at all. He had two early passions-to come to America, the land of James Fenimore Cooper, and to own his own business. He accomplished the first by cheating, certainly a rarity with him. He made a bargain with his father that if, in his mid-college career, he flunked analytical geometry and integral calculus, he could go to America. He flunked, all right. He stayed away from the final exams.
Lindberg arrived in America in 1907 at the age of twenty-one, having made the trip without bothering to look at a map. In 1909 he started his own drafting business and by 1919, after ten years he later described as "damned nasty going," he managed not only to go broke but to go $25,000 into debt. By this time General Drafting had made a few small maps of mining areas, real-estate projects and even a few local road maps. Lindberg's first sizable road-map job was for a motoring magazine. It was of the state of Vermont, and he drew every line on it with his own hand. Five years after it was published he visited Vermont for the first time.
Maps were to become the vehicle for squaring his debts and getting ahead. He secured his second state-map job, Massachusetts, from the First National Bank of Boston in 1922. This time he not only sampled and checked his base material by touring Massachusetts but, in one of his not-infrequent bursts of extreme self-confidence, undertook to classify the roads on the map. He graded roads as first, second or third class and in addition drew heavily traveled main routes in red. This, he believes, was the first time a road map undertook to classify roads and routes. He was thirty-six years old.
The following year, in another burst of self-confidence, Lindberg offered to make for Standard Oil of New Jersey the best road map of the state of New Jersey that the officers had ever seen. If they didn't think it was, he said, they need not accept it. The Jersey company, which then sold "Standard" gasoline and "Polarine" oil, took the map. General Drafting has since produced Esso maps for at least parts of every continent, recently including the final one, Australia. Now, following the lead of other Standard companies, Esso has ventured out of its long-standing territory and is entering new areas, which means new maps. Under the names Oklahoma and Pate, Esso has entered the Midwestern retail markets.
Road maps are normally made from other maps, starting with basic geological surveys and working up through the detailed drawings of state and local highway engineers. Compiling and editing a road map is more a process of elimination and selection than of compounding information. A great deal of checking is done by field men, who sample their base information by cruising over the actual ground. Local surveyors sometimes include proposed streets and roads as actualities, whereas a few will simply fail to materialize. General Drafting takes no chances on road construction. Even if it is pretty certain that by the time a map appears sections of roads will be completed, the map will still show those sections "under construction," The belief is that it is better for the map reader to be favorably surprised than to be disappointed.
No map maker can ever check every mile of road on any sizable map. "If we had to do that," Lindberg says, "I would not yet have finished the 1923 New Jersey map." As it is, a new map may require eighteen months of preparation, It is drawn twice the size of the folded map in your glove compartment, then reduced. Annual revisions take much less time, although the average map will run higher than 1000 corrections a year, not only because of road changes but because towns appear, disappear and change their names.
The objective is not to include all possible minutiae, but to obtain the greatest possible clarity for a maximum of information. The completed map is ideally a series of clear, easily grasped area pictures. Thus the focal city in a given area is not necessarily the largest or most important, but the hub of a set of road lines. Visibility also determines which roads are printed in red, a color that usually means most heavily traveled or best, but not if the color interferes with clarity. Some very good and important roads cannot be colored red without cluttering the map, hence those unfortunates must drop down to blue, generally regarded as a secondary-road map color. When this happens, General Drafting expects and gets a volume of outraged complaint from civic organizations who feel their blue road has been miscolored.
Map visibility has improved considerably over the years, even though the information carried has been multiplied. Maps used to show mountains and elevations by means of hachures little pen-stroke lines. Most road maps have shifted to tint blocks for this purpose, although Humble still requests hachures to show mountains on a map showing areas west and northwest of Texas. This is to keep reminding Texans where they can find cool heights in the summertime.
General Drafting retains county lines on its maps, but is not quite sure that it is worth-while. Salesmen, who are heavy users of road maps, often have territories delimited by county lines, but the average motoring tourist has less than a burning interest in the names of counties he crosses. Thus the map-surface compromises. The county limits are there, but subdued in line and color, a treatment also accorded national forests and other secondary geographical areas.
Points of interest are placed on maps if visibility permits, and Esso issues additional leaflets listing such points in several individual states. One landmark or spot of scenery becomes the cover of each map, and for these art editor John Larkin goes beyond his own staff and calls on well-known artists for paintings. The presence of a so-called point of interest on a map invariably attracts visitors, sometimes in embarrassing numbers. General Drafting had one case where the caretakers begged to have a fairly remote shrine removed from the map because they couldn't afford to cope with the clutter left by motorists who found it.
In his long association with maps, Otto Lindberg has developed a map philosophy which has taken him beyond the oil-company road maps. "A map," he says, "is a friendly thing, with a value and a personality of its own. It is an unusually effective sales tool." This belief has resulted in perhaps a fifth of the company's output, finding markets for nonservice-station use. The company has produced more than 1,000,000 maps of the proposed Interstate freeway network for the Portland Cement Association, a new Alaska map for Westinghouse, journey maps for associations of automobile dealers and numbers of educational products for schoolteachers. These range as far as booklets on the IGY or the life and travels of Simon Bolivar, both of which are handed out by Esso for classroom use.
The chief cartographer at General Drafting is Mike Eckerson, and in his hands are weighty decisions about which roads are main roads, which towns go in and which don't, what rivers and creeks are important enough, and which mountains are high enough. Before he reaches the point of actually drawing map features, he has shared in the field work of gathering and checking base material visiting the offices of road engineers from township and borough levels on up to the Federal Government. Mike must also be a joiner. He belongs to any association, such as road builders, which is a source of road-construction information. There is one thing about roads-they cost money, so the chief cartographer who knows where expenditures are reported is in a sound position to know where the roads will be.
The production manager who moves the finished map plates along to the lithographers (not a part of General Drafting) is Arne Kauppinnem a name that suggests that Otto Lindberg might have brought over a cousin from Finland to work in his company. That is not the case. Kauppinnen, is American-born and was bitten by maps in his adolescence. When he discovered that some maps he admired were produced by a Finn named Lindberg, Arne figured himself a shoo-in for a job and started writing long letters in Finnish, suggesting employment which was not forthcoming. What he did not know at the time was that Lindberg's first language was Swedish. However, he was finally employed-as an office boy.
A large proportion of General Drafting employees are of long service with the company, which is not altogether to be expected since it is quite common for ambitious people to shy away from one-man or one-family companies. The theory is that there is never going to be any room at the top. Handling of this delicate problem will more and more fall to Jack Lindberg, who is principal vice president of and sole heir to General Drafting. Since Jack has reached the age of forty-eight and is still a bachelor, having outwitted a long string of matchmakers, he is fully as conscious as his father of the need for a program that will assure both employees and the company of a continuing long-time future. Thus Otto a few years back distributed minority amounts of stock to senior employees and instituted a custom of giving cash Christmas gifts to all employees whenever a year's results would permit, which has thus far been every year.
Otto Lindberg's father once told him, "Since you did not finish your education, you must work twice as hard to make up for it." Otto was in no position to say the same thing to son Jack, however, since Jack is well-educated. So in advising Jack he merely shortened his own father's words and told him to work hard, which he has now been doing for twenty-four years with the company.
Jack exacts some vengeance by going home once a week to trounce his father at Scrabble, which is one of Otto's favorite games.
It was Jack who bought the company's castle in 1951. Otto Lindberg wanted to get the company out of New York and into pleasanter and more rural surroundings. Accordingly a search for a site was made and the castle at Convent Station discovered. Jack took it upon himself to put down a company deposit on the building and acreage. The elder Lindbergs at the time were at their fishing camp in northwest Maine and telephone connections were tenuous. When Jack tried to reach his father, he could get only as far as a Maine operator, who could talk to Otto but couldn't connect the two ends of the conversation. The operator accordingly served as a go-between in a conversation that went something like this:
"Mr. Lindberg, your son says he bought a castle."
"Try him again. It sounds as if you said he said he bought a castle."
"Yes, he says he bought a castle."
"That's ridiculous. Nobody buys castles. Ask him again."
"He says he bought a castle."
It was not the first time Otto Lindberg had been bewildered by a phone call. On the second day of his honeymoon in Atlantic City, he had been called back to New York on a work project, had been unable to return to Atlantic City and had called his new wife the next morning, asking for Mrs. Lindberg. The phone call wakened her and when the operator asked for Mrs. Lindberg she sleepily replied, "There is no one here by that name," and hung up.
The castle has been a very successful operating headquarters for the map makers, even if some of the office locations sound odd in their former terms. Arne Kauppinnen's office, for example, is a pantry off the dining room, while the dining room itself is the planning-and-estimating department. Employees have lunch in the dungeon and use a secret staircase to reach it. Mike Eckerson's office probably was a lady's dressing room and concealed near Jack Lindberg's office is a peephole that looks down on the great hall, which is now the lobby.
It is clear that Otto Gustave Lindberg's destiny was to serve filling stations, since his initials represent the principal products of a service station: oil, gas and lubrication. I am delighted that he chose road maps to fulfill this destiny and I have only one complaint about General Drafting. Some years ago the company started producing pictorial maps, which are part road map and part pictorial representations of what takes place in the areas covered by the map. Little scenes are drawn and placed on the map show- ing industrial, recreational, agricultural or other kinds of activities major to those sites. Sometimes the pictorial maps are general, sometimes pointed, as in a world map for the Automobile Manufacturers Association which pictures the origin of all products going into the manufacture of a Detroit automobile.
It makes me very unhappy to report that these pictorial maps are quite popular and successful, which is an insult to all simon-pure road-map buffs. We don't want to be shown. Give us the roads- we'll go see for ourselves. It makes me wonder about the oil companies. Do they want us to stay home and look at pretty pictures or get out there on those roads and burn gasoline?
THE END
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