Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [15]
“So I wake up that morning, and I’m getting phone calls. I have the London papers calling 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 news crews on the importance of geography. The camera crew from NBC’s Miami 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 unconcerned 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 airing 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 night’s NBC interview. No matter which channel Americans were tuned to,* they were seeing David Helgren.
After showing the clip in which the tanned himbo confessed to not knowing where Chicago was, the Today show’s Bryant Gumbel remarked to the camera, “Well, you know, some folks down there call that place ‘Suntan U.’”
Ouch. By the time Helgren returned home to Miami, the residents had the torches and pitchforks ready. His wife fielded anonymous threatening phone calls to their home number. “My daughter is not a dummy!” one Hurricane mom blustered. “I’m going to have you fired!” The university president called the incident “very unfortunate,” and a group of law students threatened to sue Helgren, the university, and even Bryant Gumbel for all the loss of future income they’d undoubtedly suffer. (“Why didn’t you make partner last year, Bob?” “Oh, you know, the usual. Bryant Gumbel.”) The campus public relations staff had been working that year to rebrand Miami, long sensitive to its reputation as a party school, as “a global university in a global city,” so the media circus came at the worst possible time. One miffed publicist even compared l’affaire Helgren to the famous case a decade earlier in which a Miami researcher had kidnapped a young woman at gunpoint, then buried her in a fiberglass box in rural Georgia.
“I was in the worst shit ever, from the institution and the city,” Helgren tells me. It’s been twenty-five years, but he still looks completely bewildered as he describes his unwitting