Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [59]
In 1988, the National Geographic Society was celebrating its centennial—and, in the wake of the David Helgren–spawned media cycle about map illiteracy, was in the process of refocusing its mission on geography education. Mary Lee Elden, an editor at National Geographic’s children’s magazine World, suggested a geography contest for its readers. The idea snowballed into a nationwide geography competition modeled on the Scripps National Spelling Bee, and the society’s board soon approved it as an annual event.
Two decades later, Elden is still coordinating the bee, now a massive event that involves five million participants nationwide. Winnowing a group that size—roughly the entire population of Norway—down to a single winner is a grueling six-month process, of a rigor normally reserved for the selection of Mercury astronauts or Green Berets. Thirteen thousand schools nationwide hold mini-bees each autumn, and the winner of each is given a written test. The hundred top scorers in each state advance to a state-level bee. Finally, the winners from each of the fifty states (as well as the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, U.S. Pacific territories, and Department of Defense schools worldwide) are flown to Washington each May to participate in the national bee. They take turns at the microphone through nine preliminary rounds of baffling geography questions, until just the ten highest-scoring finalists remain. These contestants appear in a televised final round ending with the crowning of a lone champion, who receives a $25,000 college scholarship and “lifetime membership in the National Geographic Society.” I’m not exactly sure what the latter entails these days, but I bet you get lots of color photos of rain forests and polar bears.
As I step into the Washington Plaza Hotel on a cloudy Wednesday morning, registration has already concluded and the tiled lobby is abuzz with anticipation. Between the koi tank and the closed-off conference rooms that will hold the preliminary matches vibrates a nervous, geographically gifted mass of humanity: fifty-five energetic kids, mostly boys, mostly in striped polo shirts of various colors, mostly heartbreakingly little. Each is the nucleus of an excited family unit that doesn’t seem to be interacting much with any of the others, beyond sidelong glances. “It sounds like some of the kids have been here many times,” one worried-looking grandparent tells her daughter in a low voice. It feels like the mob scene behind the starting line of a marathon. Everyone is waiting for the double doors to open.
Once they do, parents review room assignments and hustle their kids into their respective game rooms. The competitors will be divided into five groups of eleven each for the prelims; each group is asked the same set of questions, and only the top ten scorers overall will advance to tomorrow morning’s final. Then I hear a familiar stentorian voice at the end of the hallway, a voice that still makes my pulse rush a little every time I hear it. This isn’t puppy love; it’s just a mild case of Post-Traumatic Game Show Disorder. My old Jeopardy! nemesis Alex Trebek is walking toward me, chatting with bee organizers.
“Hello, Ken!” he says amiably. It’s always weird to see Alex out of his usual dapper Perry Ellis getup; today he’s wearing a leather jacket and Dad jeans and has a garment bag hoisted over one shoulder. The veteran quiz-show host has emceed the National Geographic Bee finals ever since the event’s inception. And he’s not just a bored hired gun jetting in for a quick paycheck: Alex is a geography bee believer.
“It’s not just maps!” he tells me sternly when I tell him I’m writing a book about maps. “That’s what we’re trying to do here: show people that old-time geography was just maps, but the new geography is all this instead”: history, earth science, ecology, economics. He tries on a crazy Jerry Lewis voice to do an impression of U.S. geographic ignorance: “‘Uh, France, sure,