Hill Country Backroads: Showing the Way in Comal County

---One of several possible ways to read Laurie Jasinski's HILL COUNTRY BACKROADS is as a straightforward biography of her maternal grandfather, Joe Sanders. And very good biography it is, of the "life and times variety." Joe Sanders was 14 in 1909 when a driver stopped the first car (a 1904 Oldsmobile) he had ever seen in front of his family's farm outside Ottoville in northwestern Ohio. That day began a lifelong romance with automobiling. A few years later, having had first typhoid fever and then pneumonia, young Joe followed his doctor's advice and went south for his health. After a few months in the seat of Comal County, Texas, New Braunfels, he enlisted in the army for World War I. Once mustered out, he returned to New Braunfels and went to work for decades as a chauffeur and mechanic for the wealthy German-American Hippolyt Dittlinger. He married the author's grandmother and began exploring by car and on foot the nearby limestone Hill Country above New Braunfels.---The author sets her grandfather's life and achievements against times when the automobile was new, the Hill Country was still wild and woolly, tourism was just starting up and unwary travelers frequently got lost for lack of any signs on the back roads indicating where they were or how far from the next town. Joe Sanders made it a personal mission to help stranded tourists. He enlisted others to help him place sign posts throughout the back country. Between 1933 and 1960 he compiled data for a series of accurate, increasingly detailed and colorful maps of Comal County and the sights no visitor should miss. These included sweeping mountain vistas, caverns, rivers, streams, ranches, wildlife and on and on. He also took hundreds of photographs converted by himself and friends into postcards to attract more tourists to the Hill Country.--The well researhed book sketches the evolution of American motoring, tourism, techniques for building roads and the benefits maps can bring to a community eager to make itself known. A simple story of American caring and getting things done.