Happy Wanderers: The Forgotten Mapmaker for a 1960s TV Show

Growing up at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains in Altadena, Tom Davis could look up and see roads heading up to the snowline and it filled him with longing—but he didn’t have a driver’s license yet. To fill his yearning, each week he bugged his mother to drive him to the Ford dealership so he could pick up the maps from the Happy Wanderers TV show. “I just had to have them for my someday travels,” he said. The Wanderers—a couple named Slim and Henrietta Barnard—traveled every road from the mountains to the desert. TV host Huell Howser was inspired by the pair and once said: “You wanted to go wherever they went.”

They had a winning theme song (Val de Ri…Val de Ra) and an affable host, but central to their sorcery was the maps. They were drawn by an artist and cartographer named Howard Burke, a master of the illustrated pictorial map genre popular in the 1920s through 1950s. Early in his career he drew intricate political maps for the Los Angeles Examiner, but later in life he was the man who distilled all the promise of Southern California into flimsy maps given away as promotions at Ford dealerships. Guys like Tom Davis still have the maps 60 years later. In tribute to Burke’s maps, Davis and his wife also now have their own RV and their own Wanderers blog.

Pictorial maps were not used for navigation so much as to evoke wonder and desire. “To own the map was to own the land,” one scholar wrote. In the case of the Happy Wanderers, the maps often detailed the stories and legends of our deserts: The Ghost of Indian Cove, the Ghosts of Glamis. Hosts Slim and Henrietta lived part time at Blue Skies Trailer Village in Rancho Mirage and were friends with Palm Springs celebrity mayor Frank Bogert. They had ancestral connections to the desert, too, as Slim’s Great Uncle was Henry Pearson, an apricot farmer and scientist who pioneered the Deepwell neighborhood.

I’d stumbled upon Howard Burke’s desert maps while researching desert stories. Like Tom Davis I grew up in view of the San Gabriel Mountains and remember looking up toward snowline with longing before I could drive. The Happy Wanderers maps gave me the same hopeful feeling I’d known as a kid in Southern California, and so I decided to go looking for the story of the artist. It seemed, though, that one of the most important cartographers to shape the public view of Southern California had all but vanished from sight.

The maps themselves are hard to find. Specialized historical map dealers sell a few and you may luck out and find an overpriced spiral-bound set on eBay, as I did. One seller pointed out that many of the maps were discarded after being used for note-taking or for napkins during road trips.

Continuing the disappearance theme, even the Wanderers TV show itself is hard to find today despite the fact that YouTubers seem to vacuum up every bit of historical nostalgia. The show stirred a brief reawakening of interest after Huell Howser paid tribute to the cast in a 1997 episode, but the travelogues for the most part are not available online and the originals are frozen in history in a film library in North Hollywood.

Howard Burke was part of the so-called Golden Age of Pictorial Mapmaking. Illustrated maps are textured and tactile, they ask you to step into a 3D landscape enhanced with detailed borders, cartouches (ornamental frames) and compass roses—directional symbols. They have been somewhat overlooked as they fall between the worlds of art and scholarship, yet the maps present a glorious landscape of their own. You could happily spend a few weeks or a lifetime exploring the ancient genre, all the way back to the Medieval Mappamundi. For a satisfying look at Southwest pictorial maps see Mapping Wonderlands by Dori Griffin.

While show hosts Slim and Henrietta Barnard were based in Glendale, the desert was their second home and the desert-is-home feeling comes through powerfully in the maps and stories. In addition to their trailer home, they purchased 20 acres in the Morongo Valley and had plans to build there (“Los Angeles Writer to Build on Desert” says a 1946 Desert Sun headline) but apparently never did.

Slim worked as auto editor for the Los Angeles Examiner, incorporating travelogues into his coverage. After his retirement from the newspaper he founded the Wanderers TV show, adapting the travelogue format for the screen. The gimmick of offering a map to go with each show brought new customers into the sponsors’ showrooms. Slim was a 6’3” portly New Englander, and a raging extrovert who talked to everyone in his path. Huell Howser summed him up as “a wonderful big man with a signature laugh.” His wife, Henrietta, was his demure counterpoint.

The Happy Wanderers first aired on TV in 1963 and went on to become one of the highest-ranking shows in the region. The very first show was Palm Springs on a Budget with Harry Oliver (of Desert Rat Scrapbook fame) and Paul Wilhelm, the poet of 1000 Palms Oasis, featured on the map.

Whether the couple visited a ghost town or a remote mine in the Mojave, it wasn’t enough to skim the surface of these places. Slim followed the total immersion method familiar to fans of Desert Magazine. (Desert Magazine and Arizona Highways also popularized pictorial maps with well-known artists Norton Allen and George Avey.)

Slim made friends with people like Joshua Tree pioneer Bill Keys, and Calvin and Ruby Black, the mystical dollmakers of Possum Trot in the Mojave. He knew all the artists –John Hilton and Jimmy Swinnerton—and he could show you the way to the Esther, Elephant and Golden Queen Mines. He got to know the postmasters in tiny places like Randsburg and Cantil. He got to know the mines and miners and of course every hermit in every arroyo, including Hubcap Willie McDavid of Palm Springs.

“He loved that stuff,” says George Bowden, a former writer for the show.

Slim ventured into crannies unknown to the most devoted desert history hounds. I never knew until studying a Wanderers map, for instance, that there was a colony of phone company retirees in Desert Hot Springs all connected with one of the last hand-cranked phone systems in the US.

Each map Howard Burke created for the show displayed an aerial view of the trip undertaken by Slim and Henrietta, with the rich detail popular in illustrated maps. This was a narrative landscape, inhabited with stories, ghosts, legends and mysteries.

Given the subject matter, it’s no surprise that the Wanderers collaborated at times on joint ventures with Desert Magazine. The Barnards traveled with editors Jack and Choral Pepper to Baja, where Slim’s high jolly laugh pealed out when he got his first facial at Rancho La Puerta. The host was proud of his laugh–often compared to that of a jackass–and he proudly displayed a jackass statuette on his desk.

And where was Howard Burke during these fun times? I wanted to find out.

At one time, in the 1940s, Burke stood alongside Charles Hamilton Owens of the Los Angeles Times as Southern California’s two most influential pictorial mapmakers. For the Los Angeles Examiner, Burke published detailed World War II maps such as “How Japan Might Attack the United States” and “If We Enter a World War and Lose.” These early maps are still coveted by map enthusiasts decades later.

In retirement years, Burke switched to doing carefree tourism maps for the Happy Wanderers. The maps were looser, more playful. I’m guessing that drawing tourist maps felt like a holiday for the artist compared to the intensity of depicting World War.

Howard Austin Burke was born in 1900 in Cook County, Ill. By 1920 he had moved to San Francisco and started working as an illustrator for the San Francisco Examiner. A biography on the Barron Maps website says the young art student apprenticed to the influential social realist painter Frank Van Sloun, a friend and colleague of Maynard Dixon.

Burke’s years working at newspapers in San Francisco and Los Angeles (1932-1940) overlapped with Slim Barnard’s years as an automotive editor for the LA Examiner. It was here that the boisterous Slim must have met Howard Burke, who was then studiously drawing maps at another desk.

Burke was married twice and died in 1967. He was survived by five sons and three daughters but seemingly no one claimed the role of family historian so his trail (as far as I was able to follow it) vanished.

In my effort to find out more about Burke, I spoke to Becky Warrington, Slim and Henrietta’s daughter, age 93. She was married and raising kids when the show was in production so she didn’t participate as much as her late brother Larry. She remembers trips to her parents’ Palm Springs home, and she remembers the name Howard Burke but that’s all she remembers about him.

I also inquired with George Bowden, the writer and de facto director for the show during the 1970s. Bowden accompanied the Barnards on many trips. “The show had no real director,” he said. “Slim, the host, worked with the camera guys to shoot things and then the producer and editor put it together and the script followed.”

Bowden, too, recalled Burke only by name. The mapmaker had died by the time Bowden joined the crew so he never met him. He does remember what a blast it was to work with the Happy Wanderers. “It was certainly one of the best experiences I ever had,” he said.

I had almost given up on ever talking to anyone who knew Burke when I received this text. “Hello Ann. I worked with George Bowden on the Happy Wanderers. I was with Slim in the early days of the show and watched Howard paint the maps.” Breakthroughs like this keep me going and I eagerly called the texter, Alan Coats.

Alan had been a cameraman on the show and remembered going down to Slim’s offices on Wilshire Blvd. in the mid-60s and there, tucked away in a closet, was a quiet man painting maps on an easel. Alan always stopped to watch him paint because his own dad, Claude Coats, was a California watercolor painter who went on to become a top Disney artist. (Alan Coats, too, became a Disney Imagineer.)

Coats and Burke exchanged few words, but Coats marveled at the mapmaker’s diligence. While Slim and Henrietta were local celebrities who attracted fans wherever they went, Burke “never went on trips,” Coats says. “He was just sitting there in his closet at the easel.”

 

After the show ended the old 16 mm films were stored in the Barnards’ son Larry’s garage. Cathy Haro, Larry’s daughter, told me that in addition to the small black-and-white maps there were prized full-color poster-sized maps. The color originals were eventually divided up among the grandkids. “Everybody was fighting over the surf map and the Catalina map,” Cathy Haro said.

The reel-to-reels jammed Larry’s garage from floor to ceiling and his wife began to feel crowded so before his death he arranged (with the help of George Bowden and Alan Coats) to have the archives moved to the Producers Library Services where the originals remain to this day.

During my hunt for Howard Burke, I began to feel a bit sorry for him. I never found a photograph of the artist. His work is not well known and he missed all the epic road trips to abandoned mines and desert castles. Then I felt even worse for him when Alan Coats told me Burke was actually hidden away in a closet when all the fun was being had.

But as I really looked at the maps and began to learn more about illustrated cartography, I saw that Burke traveled farther than most of us. He had been tilting and rearranging the entire globe as far back as the 1930s. In his desert maps, he soared over mountain ranges and leapt over the decades. Far from being stuck at home in a closet, pictorial mapmakers like Howard Burke were cosmic wanderers, transcending time and space.