A Letter From The Publisher, May 24, 1971

REPORTING for this week’s cover story on job opportunities and the class of ’71, our younger correspondents recalled the paths that led them to journalism and TIME. The way for the three 29-year-olds was not always straight.

Barry Hillenbrand, now in the Los Angeles bureau, comes from a family of physicians and dentists and was programmed to follow the tradition. “My total inability to master all 274 parts of the frog in college zoology turned my head and nose away from the profession,” he says. Hillenbrand spent two years with the Peace Corps in Ethiopia and another 18 months at N.Y.U. studying to become a historian. While a graduate student, he became a stringer—part-time reporter—for TIME and decided to make a career of it.

Bill Friedman, now in our New York bureau, had an economics fellowship at the University of Paris when he took a part-time secretarial job with the Los Angeles Times’s Paris office. This led to stringer work for the Times and then for TIME. After Army service he joined our Montreal bureau. Frank Merrick, now in Chicago, succumbed early—after his first summer job as a siren-chasing cub reporter for the Holyoke (Mass.) Transcript-Telegram. In 1968, while reporting for seven New England papers, Merrick became a TIME stringer in New Hampshire. “I got to cover the guy who looked like a sure loser—Gene McCarthy,” says Merrick. After the primary he was hired as a correspondent.

“Australia disproves the old adage that you can never go back,” says Correspondent John Shaw, one of the former Australian residents who contributed to the World section survey of the New World Down Under. On leave from our Rome bureau for the assignment cum homecoming, hefound that “the changes—in quantity and quality—have beenenormous, but they have not diluted Australia’s rich and distinct identity.”

Our color-projects editor, Edwin Bolwell, a Melbourne native who once worked with Shaw on the Melbourne Herald, spent ten days prop-stopping over 10,000 miles of the island-continent. The goal: to prepare guidelines for photographers shooting the color pictures that accompany the story. “The Australians’ fondness for beer hasn’t diminished,” Bolwell observed, “but my capacity to keep pace has.”

Former Sydney Bureau Chief Ernest Shirley came out of retirement briefly to work on the story. A transplanted South African, he recalls that he first encountered Australians as they passed through South Africa on their way to the Middle East during World War I: “My earliest memory is of watching, terrified, from an upper-story window as drunken, high-spirited, slouch-hatted Diggers brawled in Cape Town.” After seven years running our Sydney bureau, he is now a confirmed Aussie.