St. Valentine’s Massacre Closes the Map on 60-Year Road Rally

In a few sentences, after 60 years, a road rally tradition ended, with these two lines: “This winter’s St. Valentine’s Day Massacre has been our last competition. The Old Maltese is fine; 60 years seems to be a good time to say howdy and adieu.”

So, with those words, we scoured the internet a bit for some excerpts to tell the story by others…

“My husband and I used to do this rally every year back in the 70s. We scored 8th in the nation one year! Back then, it took about 2 weeks to complete, working on it each night. Being real road rally enthusiasts, we knew the lingo of the directions like “go through at..” (an intersection) The strangest instruction was “go through at ____” at which you were supposed to put a pin through the page and continue on the map on the other side! The longest instruction ever was “turn left at Beaver”. We went from Utah to Pennsylvania to find the “Beaver” place name and the next instruction took us back to Utah. Sounds frustrating, but it was fun to try to read the minds of the creators. I may do it again!”

vlzsullivan on July 23, 2020

“So this is something very different from the usual thing here, but it’s something I discovered last year and highly enjoy, and I thought it might interest some of you. It’s a bit hard to explain, so bear with me.

Basically, you’re going on a cross-country road trip through the United States using the most recent US Atlas, and have to follow vague instructions and answer questions along the way in the contest booklet. For example, it may say “Turn left on multilane highway, then go east at the first unincorporated town.” Then it could have a question such as, “Do you see the Winchester Mystery House?” and give you multiple choice answers to choose from. It’s immensely challenging and it requires a lot of patience and very careful attention paid to its instructions, and it often tries to trick you with its directions and with its multiple choice answers so that you could easily choose the wrong thing. While it often frustrates me to no end, it’s also super fun when you confidently get something right, and you pass through so many crazily named towns and areas which leads to fun research and learning about new places.

Again, this is quite different than what we usually discuss here, and there aren’t puzzles in this per se, but I at least find it really rewarding and it’s for sure something you could do with a group (I do it with my dad). It’s also been running for, get ready, 55 years! They also do trivia competitions using the most recent Almanac, which I also highly enjoy taking part in, and a smaller version of the Massacre over the summer.

It’s really fun and unlike anything else I’ve done, and it will for sure make you look at maps in a totally different way.”

dmikestar on Jan 3, 2018 at 11:58am

“Naw, this is not a real road rally like the BABE, more like an “armchair road rally” for us old and/or otherwise preoccupied peoples.

It’s done all on a map (a Rand McNally atlas) without having to spend a dime on gas, etc. It’s more like a mental exercise in reading maps and following directions, some math and some entertaining stories with bits of map trivia thrown in.

I’m almost done with my entry, one more “leg” to go. It’s pretty challenging and being a map geek, I really dig it…although I get side tracked a LOT, especially when the path goes through familiar territory.

$55 is a bit much when you read about it, but there really is a lot of work and detail that goes into the instruction booklet considering it’s a small operation and has been running for decades.

Another few days and I should be done, I can’t wait to see how I did…there’s always a question of whether I followed the directions correctly or not…they make it so you still finish even if you take the “wrong” way. It’s quite interesting…”

mapcat on Mon Jan 23, 2012 2:17 pm

From Ken Jennings, a name you may recall from the television trivia show Jeopardy!, we found this:

The road atlas has become inseparably tied to that uniquely American ritual of liberation: the road trip. When I think about driving a route across town, I picture the actual landmarks involved, but when I plan a trip any longer than an hour, my mental imagery is plucked straight from Rand McNally. In my mind’s eye, highways aren’t black-striped with yellow. They’re bright blue ribbons with red borders, stretching across a landscape white with absence: literally the open road. National forests are mottled blobs constructed, if I think hard enough about it, not out of trees but out of a lime-green cerebral cortex of tiny, winding convolutions. There are trees too, of course: one evergreen apiece in every state park, right next to a little green triangular tent.

In fact, road atlases have become such a Pavlovian bit of shorthand for travel and independence that some mapheads can satisfy their wanderlust without ever leaving home, just by opening a Rand McNally road atlas. Meet the participants in Jim Sinclair’s annual “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre,” a mail-order contest he’s held every February for over forty years. They travel a circuitous course across America from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Statue of Liberty (or the reverse route in odd-numbered years) all without ever leaving their armchairs or kitchen tables. The journey is made entirely on maps.

For the last forty years, Massacre HQ has been the Sinclairs’ sixties-era rambler just north of Pasadena. It’s a rainy, misty day in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains when Jim and his wife Sue invite me inside to what I can immediately see is a grandparents’ house straight out of central casting: public radio classical music playing quietly somewhere, shelves lined with Garrison Keillor and Agatha Christie hardcovers, grandkid photos on every flat surface. The only difference is Jim’s home office, which has metastasized to cover the whole living room. The pool table is now piled deep with boxes, envelopes, and stacks of reference books. “We have paper boxes for end tables now,” sighs Sue, who sits across from us on the plaid sofa, near her quilting basket.

“I liken the Massacre to skiing, in that when somebody tries it, they’ll either get it right away and like it, or they’ll say, “What’s this for?'” says Jim. He’s a serious, professorial-looking man in his late sixties with white whiskers and a deep, gruff voice. “I’ve given up feeling that anybody would like it, because I know that most people don’t have that kind of mind.”

I know that Jim means that not just anybody can get into his contests, but you could be forgiven for wondering if he meant that not anybody is capable of understanding them. See, map rallying is a strange and byzantine pursuit, even harder to describe than it is to master. As a kid, I would see regular ads for the Massacre in Games magazine, and I imagined the event as a freewheeling scavenger hunt through the atlas — exactly the kind of thing I would have loved at that age, though I never actually signed up. The reality of the event, I see as Jim and I peruse last year’s contest booklet, is very different.

Here’s a sample step from the third of the rally’s eight legs, this one between Paris, Ontario and Eden Park, Ohio:

8. After having gone through U.S. 24 shield on page 51, turn on highway whose number comprises two digits and that is upon a limited-access highway in the direction that’s toward nearest other unnumbered interchange.

If you can parse and negotiate that instruction correctly, you must then answer a multiple-choice question about your chosen route:

Q27. Which among these do you see first?
a) Bowling Green
b) Ohio Tpk.
c) Pemberville
d) Scotch Ridge

Questions like these are the equivalent of the manned checkpoints at a real road rally: they test whether or not you’ve followed the course successfully. Jim and his collaborators cleverly “fail-safe” each step of the way, so that even when you miss a turn or a trick, you generally get looped back onto the correct route without ever realizing your misstep.

The devious traps built into each step typically rely, in equal parts, on careful observation and on hair-splitting interpretation of the contest’s rules. You might think a “road” is the same as a “named highway,” for example, but not in the Massacre: here, they’re very different. (A road is the line on the map, and it may carry one named highway, like “Interstate 25” or “Iowa 42,” along its path, or several at the same time, or none at all.) “Course-following”—how to navigate the road between the end of one instruction and the beginning of the next—seems like a simple concept, but in practice it requires a set of four tie-breaking rules of decreasing priority, each so complex that even the word “on” comes with own Clintonian three-paragraph definition. Even punctuation matters: a place name without quotation marks refers to the place itself, but with quotation marks, it refers to the map text labeling the place. And so on.

This level of precision can sometimes make the Massacre seem airless and technical to clueless newbies like me, but Jim insists that’s not the goal. “We try to make the rules correspond to reality,” he tells me. “We try to keep as much verisimilitude as we can, to have people actually feel like they’re on the road, going from this point to that point. They’re seeing landmarks along the way. They’re watching for turns.” For longtime participants, much of the fun lies in the in-jokes and regular “characters” that pop up en route, adding some color to the otherwise legalistic proceedings. The most beloved such regular is the Old Maltese, a grizzled coot often spotted near his cabin in Malta, Montana. The Maltese is Jim’s alter ego in the yearly contest, and the Sinclairs still get phone calls at home every February asking if “the Old Maltese” is there. (Participants are encouraged to call or write if they don’t understand the rules.) “I always say, ‘He’s not in, but can I help you?'” says Jim.

These recurring traditions have kept the same players coming back to his contests for decades. They are a devoted bunch. Nancy Wilson, a retired ER nurse from Petaluma, California, has been playing in the Massacre for over thirty years. She once scheduled a trip to Liechtenstein just so that she could postmark her Massacre answer sheet from the tiny Alpine country. (Jim makes sure to recognize the top score submitted from each state and country.) Bart Bramley is a professional bridge player from Dallas (the American Contract Bridge League player of the year in 1997, in fact) and a four-time winner of the Massacre. His near-sightedness has been getting worse in later years, but he’s put off getting the LASIK surgery that would cure his myopia in minutes. Why? Because now, without contacts, his vision is clearest when he’s looking at objects practically touching the tip of his nose—the perfect distance for map rally purposes. “I can examine the map from about one inch away and see everything,” he says. “If I got LASIK, I wouldn’t be able to do that anymore.”

But time has winnowed away the faithful. Around three thousand players entered the Massacre each year at its early-nineties peak; last year less than five hundred sent in answers. It’s tempting to point to this decline as another apocalyptic sign of How Americans Hate Maps, but instead Jim blames the death of road rallying, the sport whose fans made up his core audience. “We used to ask them their age,” he says, “and in the seventies the answer would come back in their mid-thirties. Then they next year it’d be late-thirties. Then it would be close to forty. It was obvious that we were keeping the same cohort.” “Every once in a while we’ll hear from somebody saying their father or their mother has passed,” Sue adds. “I think they’re letting us know, not only to stop the mail, but to say their late parent really enjoyed it.”

“It’s bittersweet,” Jim agrees.

“Or we’ll hear from someone who says, “My eyesight’s not good anymore.'”

“We don’t dwell on it.”

“But it is sort of nice, that somebody thought enough of us to take the time to write.”

Sometimes a caller will even tell the Sinclairs how much they enjoyed finishing the contest with Mom or Dad one last time. Most solvers play alone, but others evidently make the Massacre a February family tradition. As a map lover, this sounds like an idyllic way to spend quality time with the kids. I imagine three or four generations of delighted faces crowded around an open road atlas. There are steaming mugs of hot chocolate in my mental picture, and for some reason everyone is wearing sweaters. That’s for me, I decide. This year, the Jennings family will be driving its first annual map rally!

From Road Rally eNews, we encourage you to read more from Mr. Jennings’s blog about the St. Valentine’s Massacre: click here to continue. We think you’ll enjoy it! And should you wish to purchase the book, Maphead.

From the webpage for the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre…
coast-to-coast competitions, challenges of logic, alertness, and common sense
quests from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Statue of Liberty in even-numbered years (then westbound in odd-numbered years)
journeys of thousands of miles without leaving home, because they’re all done on

http://oldmaltese.com/Massacre.html