Counting the House

The U.S. Bureau of the Census, which fans out across the land every ten years to poll every living American, may well be the biggest official collector of statistics in the world. But a family-owned firm, R. L. Polk & Co. of Detroit, probably stands as the No. 1 private data gathering outfit. It regularly touches the lives of some 100 million Americans-even if only a small fraction of them know the company by name.

By reason of various arrangements with all 50 states (in most cases, Polk pays for what it gets), Polk is able to tap the great wealth of information ac cumulated in car-licensing bureaus. As a result, it is the only central source of nationwide car registration, keeping track of all 100 million vehicles on the road. Although automakers obviously know how many cars they produce, Polk supplies the figures on actual sales. It also traces down for the carmakers the owners of autos that have been re called for repairs.

Beyond all that, Polk is a leader in publishing city directories and listing every person over 18 in every house hold in 1,400 cities by name, occupation, sex, and ownership or rental situation. From this enormous mass of information, the company is able to offer any paying customer an increasing variety of mailing lists, market research and area studies. Currently it rents names and particulars at the annual rate of $60 million.

Out of the Memory Drum. The company has a long tradition of statistical work, reaching back to horse-and-bug-gy days. The railroad had just pushed across Michigan when a young New Jerseyan named Ralph Lane Polk arrived in Detroit to seek his fortune peddling various patent medicines. He found that the Iron Horse, steaming along at speeds of 40 m.p.h., had changed the world of traveling salesmen, enabling them to visit merchants in several towns in one day. Polk compiled a Gazeteer for Michigan in 1870, listing the names and addresses of shopkeepers within walking distance of railroad depots. The R. L. Polk company has been in business ever since. It branched out into publishing city directories (which were originally intended to guide door-to-door salesmen) and, since 1922, car-registration reports.

"The computer is the thing that really broke the barriers for us. Working with a computer you not only have to be with it, you have to be ahead of it," says Polk President Walter Gardner, a 35-year veteran of the company and the first non-Polk to head it. Information was stored on slips of paper until the company installed its first computer ten years ago. Now, one of five computers in the firm's Cincinnati plant is a third-generation IBM 360-65 that operates seven days a week around the clock.

Gardner is constantly on the lookout for new uses of the data already in the computers' memory drums. A service called Gasoline Profit Index, for example, helps oil companies find locations for service stations by providing a block-by-block profile of any neighborhood in any U.S. city: how many cars are owned there, what makes and vintage, by men or women, of what age. Since Cadillacs use more gasoline than Falcons, and eight-cylinder engines more than six-cylinders, since women do not drive as much as men, it is possible to estimate down to the number of gallons how much premium gasoline a given service station should sell.

Sketching the Profile. On the basis of auto statistics and city directories, Polk computers can print out maps of cities marking the exact locations of affluence and poverty. Magazines interested in sending their more expensive mail into Buick, Oldsmobile and Cadillac homes, instead of secondhand Dodge Dart households, can rent the list from Polk. Or Polk can take care of the mail campaign altogether. It already ranks with Sears, Roebuck as one of the biggest customers of the U.S. mails. Last year Polk took care of a single 23-million-letter mailing for an automaker, a record for the company so far.

The most ambitious Polk project, sociological profiles of entire cities, was started four years ago. After last year's Detroit riots, for example, Polk supplied the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders with data about the 12th Street area, a focal point of the upheaval. Polk was able to report, among other things, that in each block along 12th Street there were 26 or more households headed by a woman, a fact that suggested many broken homes. Now, Polk has contracts with ten cities, from Pittsburgh to Asheville, N.C., to supply urban statistical data. Since it already has most of the information stored in computers, it can sell it for 12 1/2-c- a household v. the average charge of $1 to $2 per interview for a special survey.

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