In the early 1960's (many decades before drivers of cars just relied on GPS voices to let them know which highways or roads to take to reach a particular long-distance destination), I was my father's map-reading "navigator" in his car, whenever we drove from Indianapolis to either Chicago or to Bloomington, Indiana, between January and June of 1963.
So it was during these six months that I also developed an interest in collecting road maps of many of the individual states in the continental USA. And for about a year in Indianapolis, I spent some time mailing letters to various tourist boards of some of the individual states, requesting that the different state state tourist boards mail me a free road map of their state, for me to add to my "road map" collection.
By the time I was attending Columbia College in NYC, though, in the Fall of 1965, I had pretty much lost my previous interest in continuing to collect "road maps"--in the same way I had lost my previous interest in collecting postage stamps to put in my stamp collection book before, when I first entered the 7th-grade in junior high school.
Yet even as late as 1965, I was still interested enough in road maps to unsuccessfully put in an application for a summer job inside an AAA office, that used to be located in Manhattan around East 42nd Street, near Grand Central Station, on the ground floor of some skyscraper (that then housed the corporate headquarters office of some transnational oil corporation like Texaco or Socony Mobil); and which provided AAA "Trip-Ticks"/road map route guiding material for AAA members who came to this AAA office for road trip route-planning assistance.
