He was in Beijing during the first wave of anti-government demonstrations. He traveled to the South Carolina coast before the now-infamous Hurricane Hugo struck. During the disasterous San Fransisco earthquake, he was in the swaying stands of Candlestick Park. A week after his trip to West and East Berlin, the Berlin Wall swiftly and significantly came tumbling down.

Who is this well-seasoned traveler, with a good sense of timing to boot? DeKalb mayor Greg Sparrow.

His history-in-the-making trips in 1989 (none at the expense of the city of DeKalb) have been more than interesting. “I happened to be in the right places at the right time,” he explained. “There’s nothing quite like being there to drive home the point of knowing what’s happening in the world.”

His first coincidental trip was to Beijing, China from April 15 to April 22 for a mayor’s symposium. Sparrow was one of two mayors from the U.S. Conference of Mayors to attend the event.

Some of the translators at the symposium happened to be some of the demonstrating students, he said. “They informed us of events and to some degree, encouraged us to go.” Did he? “I told them ‘I think I’ll take a pass on that,'” he remembered.

At that point in the student demonstrations, “they were optimistic. To my way of thinking, I don’t think they wanted democracy to replace communism then—they wanted economic reforms, with capitalism replacing socialism. It was nothing to the magnitude of a full-blown democracy movement.”

That movement was yet to come and occurred after Sparrow left the city. “Another group took over after May 4. There was a resurgence of some students that were radical, who picked up the cross and carried it to what happened on June 4 (the government’s armed crackdown).”

In June, Sparrow headed to another U.S. Conference of Mayors trip to South Carolina, the site of September’s hurricane disaster. Though Hugo hit three months after Sparrow’s visit, the mayor had recently toured some of the ravaged cities and could identify with the destruction. “I could imagine the damage—many of the places I saw were the ones that were destroyed.”

A month after Hugo, another natural disaster struck—this time on the opposite coast.

Sparrow (a past chairman of the Standing Committee on Transportaton and Communication for the U.S. Conference of Mayors) was invited to speak in San Fransisco at the U.S. Telephone Association’s annual conference. He was slated to deliver a keynote speech on Wednesday, but the quake on Tuesday quickly changed the itinerary.

Sparrow had won tickets to the Tuesday World Series game between the San Fransisco Giants and the Oakland A’s in a raffle and was looking forward to his first World Series game.

Sitting in the first row of the upper deck in Candlestick Park, Sparrow soon noticed an out-of-the-ordinary occurrance. “We were swaying a good four to eight feet _I was looking down the line and saw we were rocking back and forth,” he said, adding, “At the time, I didn’t know what was going on.”

“I was thinking it was people (fans) clapping and stomping their feet. I’d never been in an earthquake before,” he continued, adding no one really panicked. “I actually heard someone say it was an omen San Fransiso would win.”

The quake was over in 15 seconds, the lights went out and the crowd sat in the stands for the next half hour. When they finally drove out of the parking lot, he said, “You could see the fire in the Marina district off in the distance.” They did not see the major destruction sites of the Nimitz Freeway or the Bay Bridge.

That trip was a learning experience for the mayor. “It was the wrong place at the right time and the right place at the wrong time,” he said.

About a month ago, Sparrow traveled to Germany on the eve of the historical opening of the Berlin Wall. The Federal Republic of Germany had asked the U.S. Conference of Mayors for a delegation at their expense, and he once again found himself an accidental tourist.

The mayoral delegates stayed in Frankfort, Munich and other cities during the trip, but spent Oct. 31 and Nov. 1 in West Berlin. They had the unique chance to travel to East Berlin, passing “Checkpoint Charlie” and having their pictures snapped in front of the now-defunct Wall.

Were there any rumblings of reopening the Wall at that time? “There was talk of opening up travel, but nothing to the extent of this,” Sparrow said.

When he heard the historic news a week later, Sparrow said, “The first thing I thought was I wished I could have been there. You could never imagine it would happen that quickly.”

The trip to West and East Berlin had other effects on the mayor. “It was a geographical lesson for me,” he said, adding, “I never realized how far Berlin was into East Germany. West Berlin is a virtual island 200 miles into East Germany, completely surrounded by their Warsaw Pact neighbor. And by the Wall.

“I have a tendency to read more about events in Eastern Europe, because of being there and experiencing it firsthand,” Sparrow explained. “I need to become more geographically smarter on how the rest of the world fits in relation to the U.S.”

That information is vital, according to Sparrow. “We’re becoming more and more of a global society. We have to realize it’s truly a world market and we need to find out more about the major players.”

As for future travel plans, Sparrow said he hopes to join the two-week tour of Japan with the U.S. Conference of Mayors early next year. Whatever historical event may befall him next, one thing remains clear: “I agree I have a special place in world history,” he said.