The cover story in this issue of TIME, like many of the Business and some of the Press cover stories of the past six years, was written by Associate Editor Bill Miller.

Miller first met Oilman Alfred Jacobsen last March when he was working on a story about Amerada Petroleum Corp.'s successful wildcatting in the Williston Basin (TIME, March 24). Impressed by Jacobsen's candor and executive ability and by Amerada's phenomenal success, Miller later suggested Jacobsen as the cover subject for a story on the oil industry.

To get the feel of the Williston Basin area, Miller spent several days in North Dakota last month. The first person he met, after checking into the Plainsman Hotel in Williston, was a Texan who said he was "looking over a few farms to pick up a lease or two." When he learned that Miller was with TIME, he said: "You fellows wrote me up once." The Texan, it turned out, was Dallas Insuranceman Robert Baxter, who had made this exultant boast in mid-1948: "This is a great world, and the U.S. is the greatest country in the world--and Texas is the greatest state in the U.S. and Dallas is the greatest city in Texas and the Rio Grande [National Life Insurance Co.] is the greatest insurance company in Dallas." That quotation had been used in TIME'S 1948 year-end business review, which Miller had written, to epitomize that year's booming business.

During his stay at the oilfields, Miller watched three new wells being brought in. Since none of them was a dry hole, Miller's presence was considered lucky, and C. E. Boone, Amerada vice president, asked him to light the gas flare on the third well.

Miller was born near Asheville, N.C., where his father operated the general store and where his uncle, Billy Messer, was police chief for many years. Messer later appeared in Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel thinly disguised as Big Bill Messler. At 13, Miller, big enough to pass for 16, joined the Citizens' Military Training Camps, spent a month riding the Sixth Cavalry's well-trained mares in Georgia and practicing on the rifle range until he qualified as a sharpshooter.

The rifle practice came in handy later. When Miller was working on the King Ranch cover story (TiME, Dec. 15, 1947), he went on a one-day hunt with Tom Armstrong, neighbor of King Ranch Chief Robert Kleberg Jr. After Miller dropped his first wild turkey with a shot through the neck, Armstrong, thinking it a lucky shot, politely hailed his marksmanship, poured a toast of bourbon in a tin cup. A second turkey, shot through the head, called for another toast. After Miller had shot a deer through the neck and another in the head, there wasn't much left of the bourbon bottle.

Miller's writing career began after he finished high school at 17 and joined the staff of the Cleveland Press as a copy boy in 1929, a few days before the market crash. Later, as a reporter, he covered the 1933 bank holiday, the Bonus Army's march, the Little Steel strike and the shooting of "Pretty Boy" Floyd, and he survived a mid-air collision at the National Air Races. He covered World War II as a correspondent. He has interviewed, among others, Lord Halifax, Earl Browder, Newton D. Baker, Clarence Darrow, John Barrymore and Gertrude Stein, who told him "a newspaperman is too immediate to be immediate."

One of Miller's cover stories was on his Chappaqua, N.Y. neighbor, Reader's Digest Editor DeWitt Wallace (TIME, Dec. 10). Between the time Miller made his first phone call to Wallace in April 1951 and the time the story ran, Digest editors had selected two of Miller's cover stories for reprinting -- on Du Pont's Crawford Greenewalt and U.S. Steel's Benjamin Fairless. The Digest also reprinted Miller's article on human relations in industry (TIME, April 14), one of the most reprinted stories in TIME'S history.

Another of Miller's cover stories was on the Hartford Brothers of the A & P (TIME, Nov. 13, 1950), a grocery chain with which Miller is closely familiar. At the A & P supermarket where he and Mrs. Miller shop, girls at the checkout counters count them among the store's best customers. The Millers, you see, have eight children.

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