FAULT - Maphead - page 25

Viewing this as an opportunity to put in a good word for his field, Helgren waxed expans-
ive to both reporters about America's widespread problems in geography education. The
next day was February 14, Valentine's Day. All hell broke loose.
“This was a really dull news day,” David Helgren remembers. “It was a Tuesday. Did
you ever notice there's no news on Tuesdays?”
Decades after his brush with fame, I've tracked Helgren down at his Salinas, California,
home on a bluff overlooking miles of strawberry and lettuce fields. You can guess at his
academic specialty—African deserts and archaeology—just by walking through his home,
which is full of antelope horns and tribal masks. (“My wife is Afrikaner,” he says, and I
wonder briefly if, in his shoes, I'd be able to resist the temptation to always tell people,
“My wife is a Boer” instead.) A zebra skin hangs above the dining room table where we're
talking.Nowsixty-twoyearsold,Helgrenisabigmanwithpiercingblueeyesandasnowy
beard, and he strokes his pet cat pensively as he talks, like a Bond villain.
“So I wake up that morning, and I'm getting phone calls. I have the London papers call-
ing me at home before seven A.M. because they're in a different time zone. I didn't know
what the hell was going on! I'd never been interviewed by a newspaper in my life. I was a
reclusive academic.”
The Miami Herald, it seemed, had titled its story, “Where in the World Is London? 42%
Tested at UM Didn't Know.” When that headline came across the wire, the British papers
jumped at the story, which was also spreading across the United States as the sun moved
westward. Soon every national network wanted an interview. The overrun media relations
people at the university called Helgren in a panic. “They said, 'Come into your office and
try to look respectable!' So they put a globe in front of me and a map on the wall. I was
wearing a tie, which was very not like me.” He spent the entire day soberly lecturing TV
newscrewsontheimportance ofgeography.Thecamera crewfromNBC'sMiami affiliate
happened to be an international news team, on an R&R break from covering the contras
in Nicaragua. They were savvy. After getting their sound bites from Helgren, they hurried
over to the giant swimming-pool complex at the heart of the Miami campus and started
asking good-looking kids in swimsuits where Chicago was. As the camera rolled, one un-
concerned but well-muscled young man told them, “Well, I don't know where it is, but I
can look it up.” Journalistic gold!
Helgren was hustled onto a plane to New York— Good Morning America had decided to
do a story about map illiteracy. While he was in the air, all three Miami networks were air-
ing their news pieces, and just about every newspaper in the English-speaking world was
preparing a story or a scolding editorial on the “crisis.” Johnny Carson was making map
jokes in his monologue. The next morning, Helgren was the biggest news Good Morning
America had, so he got the prime morning-show spot: ten minutes after eight o'clock. At
the exact same time, over at the Today show, they were running clips from the previous