David Lantis in 1980.

Lantis Legacy

Popular geography professor leaves unprecedented gift to California State University, Chico

by JOE WILLS

For many people, CSU, Chico professor David Lantis was Mr. California Geography. He wrote California: Land of Contrast, the standard geography textbook in the state for three decades. He founded the Northern California Geographic Society and the Los Angeles Geographic Society, which recently celebrated its 50th anniversary. He was a touchstone for untold geographers in the United States and around the world, who would test each other’s knowledge of California with the question, “Do you know Dave Lantis?”

But for his faculty colleagues, students, and acquaintances in the Chico community, Lantis was something more important than a famous geographer. He was the consummate college professor, the person hundreds of former students and associates conjure up when they imagine what a faculty member ought to be. Whether he was riding to campus, bow tie in place and bike freighted with papers, or greeting graduates at an alumni event, rattling off their names with uncanny accuracy, Lantis epitomized the caring, committed, and unabashedly unconventional prof. “To not have taken a class from Dave Lantis is to have missed a once-in-a-lifetime unique and rewarding experience,” wrote professor emeritus of computer science, and one-time Lantis student, George Arnovick, in a 1979 letter recommending him for CSU Outstanding Professor. “Dave exemplifies what a professor is in terms of scholastic and teaching dedication.”

An inspiration

Through his 34-year career at Chico until his death in 2000, Lantis was profoundly dedicated, in a variety of ways, to helping his students, his department, and his university.

To help build one of the state’s best geography programs, Lantis persuaded four of his early students—future faculty members Bruce Bechtol, Ladd Johnson, Ralph Meuter, and Jerry Williams—to get advanced degrees and return to CSU, Chico to teach. Lantis’ successful “build from within” strategy was a testament to his ability to inspire young people. “He is without question the very best college teacher I’ve ever had, and the most influential person in my career—no question,” says Meuter, professor emeritus of geography and former dean of CSU, Chico’s Regional and Continuing Education.
To spread the word about Chico’s geography department and smooth the way for students furthering their studies elsewhere, Lantis drove 31,000 miles visiting 43 colleges and all 48 contiguous states during a sabbatical in 1968. Geography professor Williams recalls, “He visited geography departments to find out what they were strong in, so he could tell students, ‘If you’re interested in Latin America, go to such and such a school.’ Dave was totally committed to geography and Chico State.”
To put the University’s best face forward in the community, Lantis participated in many city and civic groups and was almost a one-man speaker’s bureau, giving “hundreds of talks to service clubs, schools, etc.” as he put it on a faculty information sheet in 1980. “Dave knew how important the town-gown relationship was to Chico State,” says professor emeritus of anthropology Valene McIntyre Smith, a long-time friend. “He traveled continuously and always would present slides and lectures when he returned. He was a fundamental town-gown believer.”

An uncommon generosity

Lantis’ dedication and commitment to CSU, Chico have culminated in gifts to the University to help ensure its future success. With $5,000 in 1988 and subsequent gifts the following years, he and his wife, Helen, established the David W. Lantis Scholarship Fund for the Department of Geography and Planning. With his passing in 2000 and Helen’s in 2004, $2.1 million from their estate has gone to fund a faculty chair at CSU, Chico, the largest gift for an endowed professorship in the history of the University.

The Lantises were married for nearly 50 years.

It’s unusual for donors to direct schools to decide where an endowed chair can help the institution the most. “This is a really forward-thinking gift that will allow the University to accentuate its strengths,” says Bob Alber, associate vice president for advancement. As of this writing, a University committee is determining where the chair should be located. An endowed chair is a distinction awarded by the University to a scholar or teacher and is supported by earnings from an endowment fund.

Forward thinking was a Lantis family trademark. By the time David was 6, he and his parents—his mother, a high school valedictorian, had been Procter & Gamble’s first woman executive, and his father was a distinguished teacher and administrator—had planned his smooth ascent to a medical career. As a bright, talented, and affluent Cincinnati schoolboy, it seemed within easy reach. But the Great Depression changed that. Lantis held a variety of jobs, from head waiter to longshoreman, and worked his way through Adams State College in Colorado until World War II interceded. Nevertheless, coming home after his service in the Pacific, U.S. Navy Deck Officer Lantis made a list of 15 possible careers for himself. Number one and two—newspaper publisher and fast-food restaurant magnate—were briefly and unsuccessfully flirted with. Down the list was geography professor. He’d traveled widely as a boy, considered geography one of his hobbies, and liked the idea of following in his father’s footsteps.

Lantis approached faculty work like he had earlier challenges: with big plans. He came to Chico in 1957—following a doctorate at Ohio State and several teaching jobs in Los Angeles—because President Glenn Kendall recruited him to develop a geography program at Chico State College. “Dave put all his energy into building the strongest department possible,” recalls former colleague Ladd Johnson. “I joined in 1966—there were about five of us then. It grew rapidly to 10 to 12 people. Dave was truly the mastermind behind putting it all together.” During the 1960s, Chico State had the highest percentage of its students enrolled in geography classes in the CSU system. By the 1970s, according to Meuter, “we had the best damn geography program in the state. And it was inspired by Lantis.”

Lantis’ most important move in building the department may have been his first: encouraging Art Karinen to come to Chico in 1959. Professor Karinen, who passed away last year, was an expert cartographer and a World War II veteran like Lantis. While Lantis was by nature driven, Karinen was more easygoing, and the two formed a strong, complementary partnership. Their best-known collaboration was on the textbook that would become a classic, California: Land of Contrast. Karinen drew the maps for the book, which is still in print after three editions and has been listed by the State Librarian as one of the “Ten Basic Books on California.”

A lifelong collaboration

But the main partnership in Lantis’ life was with his wife, Helen. “Dave’s strength, I felt, was in Helen,” says Johnson. “She was an absolute angel, a great woman—I truly admired her.” Helen was the long-time librarian at Bidwell Junior High, which named the library after her. Like her husband, she was active in the community. A founder of the Friends of the Library, she ran the Saturday book sales for many years. Dependable, cheerful, and self-effacing, Helen made the many gatherings held at their home—especially the popular Sunday night Northern California Geographical Society meetings—go smoothly. “Helen made cookies, and cookies, and more cookies for those meetings,” says her friend Barbara Seawall. “She and Dave were very giving people.” As her husband’s travel companion on many of his whirlwind trips, Helen showed great patience and flexibility, in more ways than one. “When Dave and Helen bought a Volkswagen on a trip to Germany,” says McIntyre Smith, “they slept in it the whole time. That way, Dave reckoned, they would see the country, meet the people, and wouldn’t be staying in hotels. She was totally a good sport about it.”

Lantis ended up travelling to all seven continents, taking notes and slides on trips from Iceland to Outer Mongolia. Every trip he took, no matter how mundane, was an opportunity to add to his private store of geographic facts. On one occasion, Lantis asked colleague McIntyre Smith, who also owned a Chico travel agency at the time, to book him a flight to Seattle with as many mid-trip stops as possible. “The airline kept calling me, telling me they’d found this crazy itinerary with seven stops and was switching him to a nonstop flight,” she says. “I had to tell them he wanted all those stops. He wanted to fly in and take off and watch the landscape from his window seat—that was typical Dave.”

The constant attention to landforms, coupled with a near photographic memory, made Lantis an expert, and sometimes intimidating, geographer. Geography professor Guy King recalls a time in the early 1990s when Lantis accompanied a group of students on a field trip to Southern California. “On the bus he described every town, all the farm fields—he was the master of California geography,” says King. “He didn’t stop talking the entire way. Some students were probably frustrated by that, but it was amazing. He was a genius, he really was.”

Not just a job

Lantis’ energy and expertise were acknowledged via his campus and professional honors. Along with being named the University’s Outstanding Professor in 1979, he received the 1971 National Council for Geographic Education’s Award for Outstanding American Teacher of Geography. He was a leader in many professional organizations, including the Royal Geographical Society, the Association of American Geography, and Sigma Xi. Gamma Theta Upsilon, the International Society in Geography, named him its first international president in 1968.

In the classroom, Lantis’ command of details, strong personality, and high expectations made him a handful for students. At the same time, they knew he cared. “Even now, I really can’t forget how hard I studied in those last two classes, how hard Dave made us work, and how much warmth and appreciation I feel about his efforts on my behalf,” wrote a former student, recommending Lantis for his outstanding professor award. “I can still recall over 75 percent of the faces in those two classes, because he used to call on us, challenge us, question us, make us think … underneath that somewhat stern countenance is a man who is in love with his work.”

While Lantis, like so many others, found the political squabbles and bureaucratic delays of campus life vexing, there was little else about being a college professor he did not truly, deeply love. He eagerly taught at least 40 different courses—“I am a generalist, not a specialist,” he wrote on a list of his accomplishments—spanning history, anthropology, geology, and, of course, geography. He was terribly proud of his collection of more than 60,000 slides, accumulated from years of travel, which he used for most of his classes and community talks. It scarcely seemed like work to him, talking in front of a group, “teaching a hobby,” as he put it near the end of his career, but it gave him great satisfaction.

Nothing, however, gave Lantis more pleasure than assisting students. His home phone number was invariably on his office door, and he always had time for advising. His recommendation letters were never standard issue, and he rarely let a student stroll by without checking on his or her progress. Dozens of Chico graduates went on to careers as geographers because of his dogged encouragement. “He inspired not only me but a whole host of individuals to go on in geography,” says Meuter. “His legacy is unbelievable.”

With receipt of the Lantis’ unprecedented $2.1 million gift for a faculty chair, the University now has an opportunity to perpetuate what David Lantis lived for: helping CSU, Chico and its students be successful.

John Sutthoff, in his CSU, Chico office in 1980, sang Lantis' praises in a recommendation letter.

From One Who Knew Him

The following excerpt comes from a letter written 25 years ago by John Sutthoff, professor emeritus of journalism, recommending David Lantis for the Systemwide Outstanding Professor Award, 1979–1980:

Dave Lantis is deserving of this award for numerous reasons, but in particular because he is and has been totally committed to his profession as a teacher/scholar during the years I have known him since 1960. Dave lives, breathes, and eats the subject of geography whether he is up-dating content for his classes, reviewing student work or counseling them, or exercising his civic responsibilities in matters of urban planning and growth. And with this dedication, there is Dave’s robust enthusiasm, his fighting spirit in support of his convictions, and his loyalty to his discipline and to the University.

My ties to Dave Lantis are numerous, but I really felt I came to know him when I lived next door to him for several years. There was a steady stream of students to and from his home weekdays and weekends, plus alumni passing through town who just dropped by to see Dave and his wife, Helen. Dave would drop whatever he was doing to spend time with these persons. His bike on the weekends would be weighed down with papers, and throughout the weekend Dave would surface in his garden from time to time to catch his breath. Weekends and holidays would find him dashing off to some corner of California to photograph and up-date his slides or materials for a book or article. There were also the circulation of petitions, and the return home after late night meetings of the city council or planning commission at which Dave would observe or speak—often as an expert witness.

Dave is an institution at the University, to his students, and to this community. He deserves this recognition because he exemplifies what it is to “profess” in all dimensions of his life. He gives stature and believability to the academic profession. I feel he inspires students and serves as a worthy model for other faculty. Dave is a community asset because of his special knowledge and his willingness to share these talents with others.