When General "Jumping Joe" Swing, First Corps commander, came in from Corps Headquarters in Kyoto, 11 hours after Fukui's tragic earthquake (TIME, July 12) he asked TIME Correspondent Carl Mydans "How did you know there was going to be a quake here?"

Mydans, who claims no crystal ball, was actually in Fukui to dig up material for a forthcoming TIME story on Japanese recovery. He wanted to observe a segment of Japanese life that was not directly under the influence of Tokyo, an area which had been hurt by war but had recovered quickly, in which farming, fishing, and business were all represented, and where the American military government commander knew and liked the people and had won their confidence. "We selected Fukui as a good sampling ground," cabled Mydans, as a postscript to his disaster report, "and had found it so in the few hours we spent there before its tragedy ended it."

Between helping the injured, working his camera, and taking his story notes, Mydans found plenty of evidence why the people of Fukui held the American military governor, Lt. Col. James Hyland, in such high regard. In socks and undershorts, Hyland's instant command was "set up a first aid station on the lawn"--where broken and bleeding Japanese flocked even before the second quake hit a few minutes later. Then, when it was discovered that all communication was cut off, he ordered three reconnaissance teams to fight their way out of the city, and not to come back until they had aid and supplies on the way.

Hyland, he wrote, insisted that the Japanese be given full credit for their magnificent behavior throughout the crisis, but actually the Colonel himself and his team of 10 officers and 17 men served as the main rallying point for the crushed and stunned natives. (One of Hyland's staff, a young officer who drove an army truck up a blazing driveway where Mydans was shooting pictures, leaped out, tossed some cans of gasoline in the truck and backed out furiously, shouting at Mydans, "looks like you found a story." He turned out to be former TIME circulation department worker Mike Sednaoui.)

Although news correspondents don't generally enter their trade in search of the quiet life, Boston-born Carl Mydans has had a more than spectacular career since he came with TIME, Inc. in 1936, as a LIFE photographer. One of his early jobs was a story on New York City's Queens-Midtown tunnel, where he worked with the .sandhogs below the bed of the East River, got the bends, was revived, went back for more. He covered the Russo-Finnish war in 1940, covered the retreat of the French government from Paris to Bordeaux, then 15,000 miles and 18 months later, shot a picture series on the Philippines' preparation for war--which he sent off to LIFE one day before Pearl Harbor. He and his wife and fellow TIME correspondent, Shelley Smith Mydans, spent 21 months in Japanese prisons in Manila and Shanghai, were repatriated on the Gripsholm in 1943.

The earthquake was the second eventful occasion in Mydans' life in which General Swing figured--the first having been when he accompanied the General, then commander of the 11th Airborne Division, back into Japan on occupation day, August 30, 1945.

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