John “Jack” O’Donnell, center, is pictured Sept. 15 with his four children. From left are John O’Donnell III, Mike O’Donnell, O’Donnell, Lynn O’Donnell and Margaret O’Donnell. Daryn Slover/Sun Journal

AUBURN — John E. O’Donnell II mapped out a career for himself starting in 1961, and this week at the age of 104 recalled how he began the tax assessing and mapping business used by numerous municipalities.

“The need for it was there forever … it was to provide accurate information about land to assessors,” he explained Tuesday at his home in Auburn. “Up to that point assessors had accurate information about buildings, about the equipment, but they had no idea how to value the land. And because there was no accurate information, the aim of the tax mapping was to provide that accurate information.”

It’s not a business most consumers have much connection to or interaction with, yet municipalities depend on tax mapping, assessment and revaluation to keep the property tax dollars rolling in. A good part of what the company deals with is called cadastral data, more commonly known as parcel data, and it includes the exact coordinates of a parcel of land, ownership information, zoning, land use, value and more.

As O’Donnell explains it, aerial photos became widely available after World War II.

“With an aerial picture you’ve got the land in essence, right there. All you have to do is add details,” he said. Details like boundaries and information gleaned from deeds at the county courthouse or town hall, whether there were structures and how many acres or how the land was being used.

John “Jack” O’Donnell sits quietly Sept. 15 during his 104th birthday party in Auburn. Daryn Slover/Sun Journal

John “Jack” O’Donnell graduated from Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, in 1943 and soon after entered the U.S. Air Force, where he trained as a weather observer. He served at Bradley Field in Connecticut, the Pentagon and at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona.

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He went Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, after the war, where he obtained a master’s degree in forestry.

His introduction to Maine landed him at the Hollingsworth & Whitney pulp and paper mill in Waterville.

“I got on the train in New Haven, and I got off the train in Waterville,” he said. “I asked somebody where the office was, and they pointed across the river. The railroad station was on the town side,” he said, while the mill was across the Kennebec River.

After meeting his boss, a jeep picked him up to take him to the French Canadian pulp camps by Moosehead Lake. O’Donnell remembers Greenville was the first town and they kept going about halfway up the lake, where the driver turned to him. “He said, ‘This is where we leave civilization. And you’ve never been to Maine before?’ No. No, I laughed, and I said I’ve been out of civilization since I got off the train.”

Several years later a classmate at Yale helped him land a job at J. W. Sewall Co. in Old Town. O’Donnell was hired to work on tax maps and was sent to work in the field in New Hampshire, but his role included land surveyor, highway engineer and forester as well.

“Tax mapping in those days was a big deal,” O’Donnell said, “partly because they discovered that they could take aerial photographs cheaply and do fieldwork using the photographs as a working tool.”

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John E. O’Donnell appeared in a 10-year anniversary photo for his employer with all his aerial photography gear in 1957. Submitted photo

In late spring of 1954 O’Donnell and co-worker Donny Daggett were sent to Norway to do original tax mapping, and while working there he met the love of his life, Jackie Normand of Lewiston, who was filling in at the Central Maine Power office.

“She walked up Main Street from the Central Maine Power office to the restaurant each night,” O’Donnell explained. “My buddy and I sat on the porch of one of the houses on her path. He said to me, ‘Jack you ought to check her out.’ And then the next thing he said, ‘I’m gonna be tied up at suppertime.’ So, I went to the restaurant, and she was sitting there. I introduced myself, and everything followed from that.”

They married in 1954, and Jackie died in 2014. “Yeah, I miss her to this day,” O’Donnell said.

O’Donnell worked for Wright-Pierce in Topsham as mapping manager and then manager of aerial photography before starting his company in Auburn in 1961.

Three of his children now work at the company, which moved to New Gloucester 25 years ago.

O’Donnell said the tax mapping businesses will always be needed.

“Because towns need money to operate, they have to keep taxing every year and the maps change every year, which means our companies they have lots of business guaranteed,” he said.

John ‘Jack’ O’Donnell’s family held a party Sept.15 in Auburn to celebrate his 104th birthday. Daryn Slover/Sun Journal

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