SUSAN DEEMER

Orange County Business Journal

After spending more than 36 years at the helm of California’s Thomas Bros. Maps, owner, Chairman and Chief Executive Warren Wilson says he plans to retire next year and either sell or take the 83-year-old company public.

Wilson, 76, who toasted the launch of the company’s Washington, D.C. edition last year by inline skating along the Mall with his youngest daughter, has in the past indicated his intention of keeping the business in the family. In June, Wilson promoted his son-in-law, Glen Jansma, from senior vice president of operations to president and chief operating officer.

“My initial intention was to pass the ownership on to my children, but now I’m reconsidering that because it’s too much burden and because none of them are active in the management of the business,” Wilson said.

The company, which moved from Los Angeles to Irvine in 1980, is best known for its famous map books the detailed street guides that help motorists navigate the dizzying array of streets in Los Angeles, Orange and other counties.

In recent years, the company has been expanding its franchise and modernizing its mapping methods.

With annual sales stalled at about $15 million in the mid-1980s, Wilson invested $10 million to switch from outdated manual cartography methods to a modern digital process. As part of that conversion, the maps are now available in CD-ROM versions.

The new digital maps comprise about 10 percent of the 500,000 or so Thomas Guides sold each year. Although digital maps are the new trend among cartography companies, the spiral wire-bound street guides which in the early days were small enough to fit into a car’s glove box remain indispensable to many California motorists.

Originally available only in California counties, there are now more than 60 editions of the Thomas Guide nationwide. A Washington, D.C. edition was published last year, followed by editions for Baltimore, Maryland and Northern Virginia.

Thomas Guide is also making map books for Seattle, Portland, and Phoenix. Plans are to add another 10-15 metropolitan areas each year, including next month’s launch of a Clark County, Nevada map book, which includes Las Vegas.

Thomas Bros. was founded in Oakland in 1915 by cartographer George Copeland Thomas and his two brothers. It moved to L.A. in the early ’40s, gaining attention by publishing small pocket maps to the Hollywood mansions of film stars such as Clara Bow, Mary Pickford and Gary Cooper.

“Hollywood Stars Maps were sold in kiosks or booths around the Hollywood area, and it would show the location of the movie stars’ homes, with an index,” Wilson said. “In those days, there was quite an interest in the homes of the stars, and they didn’t travel all over the world they were here.”

But those movie-star maps were later dropped when Thomas Bros. devised its popular page-by-page grid system in 1948.

When Thomas died in 1955, his widow gave the company to her sister, who sold it in 1962 to attorney Wilson and accountant Thomas Tripodes. Wilson bought Tripodes’ shares in 1991, but Tripodes remained on the board until he died six weeks ago.

These days, Wilson divides his time between his Oakland home and the Irvine offices, which include a retail store, printing press, distribution operation and work space for about 200 cartographers.

Thomas Bros. Maps licenses its databases to dozens of local, county and state government entities including the California Highway Patrol, Pacific Bell and Edison International. These multi-year contracts range from $10,000 to $100,000 annually.

And this year, Thomas Bros. moved back into the folding-map business, entering a contract with Seattle-based King of the Road to print folding maps in the Pacific Northwest area.

“We got into that market for the first time last year. The business has a different distribution system, buyers and market,” Jansma said. “We have never focused on it.”

Another new product was launched about three years ago, when the company combined several of its books into a single book. These multi-county editions are printed in a portrait format, have a single index and feature three scales including detailed larger print. The Metropolitan Bay Area edition, which combines seven counties under a single index, was the first.