A Letter From The Publisher: Nov. 20, 1964

ONE lucky thing about the Notre Dame football coach, Ara Parseghian, wrote a Midwest sports columnist last week, was that he hadn’t made the cover of TIME. This wry little note took public notice of a myth that is a continuing topic of conversation among journalists —particularly sportswriters. It is known as the TIME cover jinx.

No one knows just how the myth got started, but it has persisted for 30 years. Any sports figure who gets on the cover of TIME, goes the mythology, is doomed to defeat—in a phrase, has had it. TIME Subscriber Ara Parseghian saw that jinx note in the sports column while Correspondent Marsh Clark was interviewing him for this week’s cover. He smiled rather bravely and allowed that he wasn’t worried. How ever, while there is no computerized or even uncomputerized evidence to support the myth, it can be said that someone almost always loses in sports. And so Sport Writer Charles Parmiter waited rather impatiently through much of the game last Saturday afternoon before he started putting the final touches on his Parseghian story. The cover press was running. Was the jinx at work?

Look who lost the big football game of the season. None other than Michigan State Coach Hugh Duffy Daugherty, who has had only one losing season since 1954, who hadn’t lost to Notre Dame since that year and who had never lost a game to Ara Parseghian. Duffy Daugherty was on the cover of TIME, Oct. 8, 1956. Jinxed!

HMM.” said the researcher, “it looks like a pan of worms.” That was at an early stage of the project that produced the BUSINESS section’s map of the million miles of pipelines that lie like a set of ribs under the surface of the U.S. From the idea, through the pan-of-worms stage, to the printed page this week, the map was three months in production.

Once all the data had been gathered, the big problem for Cartographer R. M. Chapin Jr. and his staff was to get it all on a two-page map and still make it clearly readable. The rather large aim was to differentiate among natural-gas, crude-oil and product pipelines, to show oilfield areas and natural-gas fields, and to rank refinery areas by size. Besides high cartographic skill, all this called for a special printing process. For the U.S. editions, the map was printed in eight colors—yellow, magenta, green, grey, gold, pink, blue and black. To get sharper differentiation between the lines and patterns, it was printed as if it were a piece of fine art—by sheet-fed offset on heavy paper—and then was bound with the rest of the magazine, which came off rotary letter presses. For the overseas editions, which are always printed offset, the problem was different: press limitations prohibited use of eight colors, so a pattern had to be devised for use of five colors—red, blue, black, yellow and tan.

So far as we know, no one—not even in the industry—has produced such a map of the U.S. pipeline network. And, considering the time, skill, care and cost involved, we’re not surprised.