By Matt Schudel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 16, 2006
Walter W. Ristow learned to drive by skidding his family's Model T across the frozen lakes of Wisconsin and later drove through every state in the Lower 48. No one can remember a single time he got lost.
He did his homework beforehand, plotting his course and learning about historic sites and geological formations along the way. Wherever he went, he picked up local road maps, which used to be given out at gas stations, and he kept every one of them.
No ordinary tourist, Ristow was serious about finding his way from one place to another -- he had a doctorate in geography, after all, and was perhaps the foremost authority on U.S. cartography and, in particular, road maps. He wrote a book on Christopher Colles, who created the country's first road maps in the 18th century.
So when Ristow hit the road, a car ride was nothing less than a voyage of discovery.
"A road trip with Walter was an educational experience," recalled his son Steve. "He could look at a map and understand the geology and sociology of the surrounding area."
Ristow spent 32 years with the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress, including 11 years as division chief. At the library, he managed the largest collection of maps in the world -- 3.5 million when he retired in 1978, now 5.2 million.
"He was an important figure in the history of cartography," said John R. Hébert, the library's geography and map chief, who first worked with Ristow in 1969.
Maps are as old as travel itself, but Ristow was more than a curator of the beautiful and the rare. He saw himself as the custodian of artifacts that help unlock the mysteries of who we are as a people.
Besides American cartography, he was an expert on Dutch maps of the 16th and 17th centuries, aviation and sea charts and globes of the Earth and celestial bodies. He wrote hundreds of papers on mapmakers and map librarianship -- and once actually made a globe.
Yet even as he studied ancient artifacts, Ristow valued the lowly gas-station giveaways almost as much as the hand-drawn vellum charts that guided explorers into unknown lands. Before he died April 3 of heart disease at age 97, he had completed a manuscript on the history of American road maps.
"He saw them as a populist or democratic expression," Steve Ristow said. "Road maps were maps everyone could use. They connected people to each other."
Walter William Ristow was born in La Crosse, Wis., spoke German as a boy and attended a German-language school through fifth grade. He later sang German lullabies to his three sons when they were growing up in McLean.
In his youth, he played pickup basketball for extra money and was so good with tools that he made his own furniture. He worked for Standard Oil for a couple of years to earn money to attend the University of Wisconsin.
"He wanted to be a scientist but couldn't afford the lab fees," his son said. "Geography was the only science without lab fees."
Geographers were seen as adventurers in those days, charting parts of the world that had yet to be mapped. Ristow journeyed to Brazil in the 1930s and received a master's degree from Oberlin College in Ohio and a doctorate from Clark University in Worcester, Mass.
Two years after joining the New York Public Library's map division in 1937, he went to Germany to explore his ancestral homeland of Pomerania. On the train, he encountered German soldiers mobilizing for the invasion of Poland that launched World War II.
Ristow retreated to London, then boarded one of the final passenger ships to cross the Atlantic in 1939. That year, in the map division's annual report, he wrote: "Emasculated and disheartened Czechoslovakia becomes part of the German Reich! The World is in turmoil and we must have maps!"
One day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Ristow was asked to furnish maps of Japan to U.S. authorities. For almost three years, while retaining his position at the New York library, he analyzed maps for the Office of Military Intelligence.
Not all of his work, though, was so weighty. Writing about a collection of treasure maps at the Library of Congress, he offered this whimsical disclaimer:
"The Library of Congress assumes no responsibility, of course, for the accuracy or inaccuracy of the maps, and offers no guarantee that all who consult them will find tangible riches."
A few years after his wife, Helen, died in 1987, Ristow moved to a retirement home, decorating his apartment with maps, atlases and globes.
Among his possessions, his sons found a bulging folder labeled "Hand drawn maps" -- a collection of hastily sketched maps that people draw when inviting someone to their homes.
Ristow saved them simply because they were maps. And every map, no matter how humble, helps you find your way in this world.