THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, April 21, 1995 TAG: 9504190302
SECTION: CHESAPEAKE CLIPPER PAGE: 11 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Cover Story
SOURCE: BY PATRICIA HUANG, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 52 lines
There was a moment of apprenhension when a call about a house fire came in to the Portsmouth fire station one night, recalled retired Battalion Chief Clarence W. George.
It was an evening in the early 1950s when the call for help came from ``704 Portsmouth Boulevard.''
The problem was this: There were three houses with that address.
``There was Gosport Road and Effingham Street and some other street and the city had taken them all and changed it all to Portsmouth Boulevard,'' George said. ``I told them, `Send an engine to all three of them.' ''
To make the fire department's logistic problems even worse, George said, there were never any reliable maps in the city.
So that's when George, who joined the department in 1942, decided he would make his own maps.
``It started as a thing to help myself,'' he said. ``There are so many little problems that always crept up like that. People don't realize.''
But what began as a hobby for George soon turned into a business with great demand.
``I started with just Portsmouth, but then there were pharmacies and hardware stores and furniture stores that would get deliveries and they'd say why don't you cover Nansemond County or Isle of Wight or Deep Creek. So I started spreading out,'' George said.
He issued a new edition once a year, selling his ``Street Finder Map Book'' of hand-drawn charts for about $95 each.
``It was quite a long process. Sometimes I would find out there were about 10 or 12 new subdivisions by the time I was (publishing the map), and I'd have to go back and change and add them all,'' he said. ``But I covered every street in Suffolk, Isle of Wight, Portsmouth and Chesapeake.''
In his Portsmouth home last week, George, 74, flipped through a copy of his 1985 map, the last map he ever made. A business card taped inside the cover of the two-inch-thick, three-ring binder boasts, ``Call Us - We have the answer.'' Detailed with block numbers, fire hydrants and apartment numbers, the maps were a fireman's dream. In fact, Chesapeake and Portsmouth fire departments purchased George's maps for years until he retired. ILLUSTRATION: Photo by L.Todd Spencer
Clarence W. George flips through his book of maps.
KEYWORDS: CHESAPEAKE FIRE DEPARTMENT by CNB