President Roosevelt, in the Oval Room of the White House, refers to his own map as he emphasizes a point in his radio address to the people Roosevelt's fireside chat was presented February 23, 1942. In advance of the address Roosevelt asked citizens to have a world map in front of them as they listened to him speak. "I'm going to speak about strange places that many of them never heard of—places that are now the battleground for civilization," he told his speechwriters. "I want to explain to the people something about geography—what our problem is and what the overall strategy of the war has to be. … If they understand the problem and what we are driving at, I am sure that they can take any kind of bad news right on the chin." Sales of new maps and atlases were unprecedented, while many people retrieved old commercial maps from storage and pinned them up on their walls.