Bremerton

Union Oil Company gave away city and road maps through its 76-branded gas stations across the western United States — a ubiquitous marketing practice from the 1940s through the 1970s, when a free map was one of the few reasons a driver might choose one station over another. This Bremerton edition was presumably on the counter at Union 76 dealers throughout Kitsap County. Bremerton, on the western shore of Puget Sound, is built around the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard and is linked to Seattle by ferry — the fair, as the crow flies, was about 30 miles across the water.

The back-cover ad is doing two jobs: drawing visitors to the Century 21 Exposition, which ran April 21 to October 21, 1962, and specifically to Union Oil's own attraction there. The 76 Sky Ride was a gondola cable system — orange-and-blue cars holding three passengers each, suspended from cables strung roughly 55 feet above the fairgrounds and spanning some 1,400 feet (about four city blocks) from one terminal to the other. The Space Needle shown in the illustration was then only weeks old, built expressly for the fair. At the bottom of the panel, small text reads: "Float high above the fairgrounds in futuristic cable cars" — a pitch that was, in 1962, entirely straight-faced.

After the exposition closed, the Sky Ride gondola equipment was sold to the Puyallup Fair (now called the Washington State Fair, south of Tacoma), where a lengthened version of the route continued to operate into the 1980s. The Bremerton map inside — not visible in this scan — would have shown the city's grid as it stood in the early 1960s, before the urban renewal projects that later reshaped the downtown waterfront.