A Letter From The Publisher: Mar. 22, 1963

CONTINENTS just sit there by the centuries, while across their terrains crops grow, peoples wax and wane, and nations struggle. Sometimes even the slowest of continents quickens into the news: Africa’s burst of independence three years ago made it something more than a locale for Hemingway movies, and the Middle East region, so volatile in the mid-‘sos, is becoming so again. Journalistically, it is increasingly the turn of Latin America. For too many years that area was ignored by many Yanquis, who regarded it as a place inhabited by an undistinguishably homogeneous group of Latins. In President Kennedy’s estimation, it is “the most critical area in the world today.”

TIME has been publishing a Latin -American edition in English since 1947, in which, besides all the news’ published in the U.S. edition, extra Latin American coverage was added. Lately we have decided that so widespread is the interest, and so important is the need to know, that we have added more Latin American news to all our editions. Readers may have noticed that in recent weeks our Hemisphere section, which in the past was often confined to one page, now runs to two or three. We have six fulltime and 28 part-time correspondents in Latin America, and we expect that attentive TIME readers, as opposed to most Americans, should easily be able to pass a quiz identifying the nationality of such names as Rómulo Betancourt, João Goulart, François Duvalier, Jânio Quadros, Arturo Frondizi, Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre, López Mateos and Cantinflas. Or can you?

WHEN Correspondent Nick Thimmesch moved to our New York City bureau after stints in Detroit and Washington, he could reasonably count on spending his time covering Governor Rockefeller, politics, and an occasional concert or art gallery opening.

In practice, Thimmesch has been doing a little bit of everything, from cover research on his old Detroit friend, Architect Minoru Yamasaki, to Labor Leader Bert Powers and the New York newspaper strike. And a lot of his time has been spent detailing the anonymous urban frictions of race and poverty. One day last week, at the urging of Senior Editor George Daniels, he set to work to report on Cassius Marcellus Clay for this week’s cover story by Sport Editor Charles Parmiter.

It wasn’t exactly unfamiliar territory to Thimmesch. He and Clay got to know each other the night of the Liston-Patterson fight, when they afterward went out on the town together —as much as one can with a 21-year-old fellow who doesn’t drink and stays away from foxes (his name for the girls).

Back in his Detroit days, Thimmesch used to spend his spare time judging boxing matches, earned his professional license, and in one close fight between Sugar Ray Robinson and Wilfie Greaves gave the decision to Sugar Ray by one point.

Thimmesch spent so many hours last week before and after the fight with Clay that he no longer had to suspect that some publicity man must be making up Clay’s vivid quotes. He ended the week helping out with the cooking in Clay’s Louisville bachelor quarters, and enjoying himself on “the kind of assignment you don’t have to concentrate on, just endure—just keeping up with the man.”