Tonight our own Curtis Carroll is speaking on the life of H.M. Gousha for the Chicago Map Society.
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.
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
