To all RMCA members in Chicagoland - 

You’re invited to the April 21, 5:30 pm meeting of the Chicago Map Society at The Newberry Library, 60 W Walton St, Chicago, IL 60610. I’ll be speaking about the life of Harry Gousha and his early contributions to the advancement of the giveaway road map. It’s expanded from a talk I did at the 2013 West Coast Map Meet in Stockton, Calif. Hope to see you there.

Date: Thursday, April 21, 2016
Title: The Life of H. M. “Harry” Gousha: The Single Most Important Person in the Free Road Map Era
Speaker: Curtis Carroll
Location: Ruggles Hall, The Newberry Library

Harry Mathias Gousha was one of the most influential and visionary men in the early evolution of Chicago’s road map industry—yet relatively little has been revealed about him. He began his career at Rand McNally, where he quickly ascended through the ranks and then courageously started his own firm that would become one of the most successful map companies of the twentieth century. Curtis Carroll will trace the highlights of his career from 1918 to 1940 and, in doing so, reveal a lot about the maturing of commercial map publishing and Chicago’s role in it.

Curtis has had a long, and quite personal interest in Gousha and his company: he talked to Mr. Gousha by phone when he was 17, a year before Gousha’s passing in 1970, and was, for two years, Western Regional Sales Manager for the H. M. Gousha Company, prior to the company’s sale to Rand McNally in 1996.