By Micheal Carmichael
May/June 2011
When you head a global company that was founded in 1870, you could be tempted to rest on your laurels. That’s not Stephen Polk’s approach.
Polk is the great-grandson of Ralph Lane Polk, the producer of the Polk City Directories — a 19th-century print combination of YP.com, Yelp and Google.
The idea of having a directory for a city wasn’t even necessary until the population became large enough so that a visitor couldn’t simply ask the local innkeeper or town crier where so-and-so lived or where a breeches maker might be found. Once the first one in America had been published in Philadelphia in the late 1700s, directories began to be commonplace, eventually spreading to smaller and smaller towns. Gathering the information for a directory required men (it wasn’t considered a ladylike occupation) to go to each house and business much as a census taker would — but directories were often published each year instead of every 10, and the population during the early years was often mobile.
[SYSTEM-ADLEFT]Ralph Lane Polk (The Founder, as Stephen refers to him) had been a musician in the Civil War. Even though he had been born in Bellefontaine, Ohio, he went to school at the Pennington seminary, then a Methodist college preparatory school in New Jersey, and enlisted with a New Jersey regiment on Valentine’s Day in 1865. “After he was mustered out in July of 1865 at Hall's Hill, Va., right outside Washington, he began to travel,” says Stephen Polk.
“He discovered someone who was making directories so he worked on a directory crew and learned the business. He ended up in Detroit and decided to publish a directory on his own. That was in 1870. He rode the train between Detroit and Chicago, collected the names of all the businesses at the train stops, then created a small publication that he sold to salespeople who rode the train and sold to those businesses along the way.”
The “small publication” was printed by James E. Scripps. “The story that was told to me by my father,” says Polk, “was that he actually got in trouble for printing the directory on one of the presses owned by the company he was working for at the time. That led to him leaving and setting up the Detroit Evening News.” Scripps’ sister later married George Booth and together they founded the Cranbrook Educational Community — for which Stephen Polk, more than a hundred years later, now serves as a trustee.