Dear Time-Reader

Dana Tasker, who became TIME'S Executive Editor a fortnight ago, was born 47 years ago in the writing-minded small town (pop. 6,044) of Gardiner, Me. Just around the corner, Poet Edwin Arlington Robinson had made his start toward three Pulitzer prizes. Nearby lived Novelist Laura E. Richards (Captain January). In this neighborhood, young Tasker developed a critical eye and a sensitive ear at about the same rate that he speeded up his tennis game. He also played center on the high-school football team, got stuck with a durable nickname, "Tack."

Amherst College brought a new set of literary influences into his life, especially an eye-opening course in French criticism and the friendship of Professor-Poet David Morton, a fellow DKE. After Amherst--and a summer of football and track coaching with Knute Rockne--Tasker taught English and coached track at Deerfield Academy. While doing graduate work at Columbia University, he began writing book reviews for Outlook and other magazines. After a turn on the Paris Times, he went to Reader's Digest for three years, took time off to edit a weekly newspaper, and spent most of the next three years editing Newsweek.

Tasker came to TIME in 1937 as an editor in search of an assignment. He soon got one: to edit Business & Finance and reorganize the picture department. When we decided to put in the teletypesetter system, Tasker was given the job of working out editorial procedures to fit this new production method.

He has been personally responsible for developing TIME'S unique style of cover portraiture, and has put in two long stretches as editor of the Letters column. At one time or another, he has held down almost every editing post here, and gained a reputation for never quitting anything until he figures it is as good as he and the people working with him can make it.

When Tasker comes to work late (after 9), more than likely he has been out to Belmont Park to watch one of his three race horses work out. Two of them are two-year-olds, with promise, he hopes.

Otto Fuerbringer, 40, who succeeds Tasker as Assistant Managing Editor, is a 6-ft. 1 1/2-in. Midwesterner. He took to journalism so naturally that he can't remember when he did not plan to make a life of it.

Son of a Lutheran theologian, he went to Harvard, where he studied writing under Critic Bernard DeVoto ("Cut out those adjectives"), became president of the Crimson, got a degree in History and Literature. Fuerbringer went back home to a reporter's job on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, a practical journalism school which carried in its masthead Joseph Pulitzer's injunction: "Never be satisfied with merely printing news." There he heard the exhortations of a demanding city editor on how to get a story ("Don't come back until you've got it") and the need for accuracy ("When you're on the Post-Dispatch, you don't assume").

Fuerbringer dug out and wrote the first comprehensive story of St. Louis gambling bosses, an early-day Kefauver-type investigation, one of the many that have appeared over the years in the Post-Dispatch. He covered the state legislature and city political campaigns, spent many of his afternoons digging up stories at St. Louis' famed zoo, started an art column and wrote book reviews. After an eight-month trip through Europe, he turned out a series on pre-Munich Germany. Meanwhile, he also wrote features for The Saturday Evening Post.

After he became a National Affairs writer for TIME in 1942, Fuerbringer did a dozen cover stories during the war years. Among them : Charles Wilson, Arthur Vandenberg, James Byrnes, Thomas Dewey, Harry Hopkins. The first of his two covers on Harry Truman, published a week before the 1944 election, was widely used as a source when Missouri's little-known politician became President five months later. At different times, he has edited every department of TIME, edited National Affairs for three years (1946-48).

Fuerbringer is still a loyal St. Louis Cardinal fan. He finds time for squash in winter, tennis in summer, and in all seasons for his four children, aged five months to ten years.

Cordially yours,

James A. Linen

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