One of the occupational badges of a veteran foreign correspondent is his bulging passport. Recently one such correspondent arrived in New York with a worn, battered old passport which had swollen to 140 pages. He is John Graham Dowling, TIME'S correspondent in Southeast Asia, who had just flown in from Singapore with his wife and eight-month-old son.

Long before he joined TIME'S staff, John Dowling was a veteran traveler. He began traveling early in life, he says, simply because his father, Actor Eddie Dowling, and his mother, Comedienne Ray Dooley, "were always on the road." At about the age of one year John made his own stage debut. It was a vaudeville act in which an ac tor uncle carried him across the stage in a harness arrangement made of diapers fitted with a suitcase handle.

Despite this early exposure to the theater, Dowling first decided to be an architect. After graduating from La Salle Military Academy on Long Island, he entered Notre Dame University. However, says Dowling, "at the end of two years it was finally clear to me that mathematics is a factor in architecture. Since I still added on my fingers, I decided to drop out."

In 1936 Dowling got a job as cub reporter on the Chicago Times. In 1941 a new paper, the Chicago Sun, was started, and Dowling joined the staff. The Pearl Harbor attack came three days after the paper began publishing, and Dowling was sent to Honolulu, a move that was to keep him hopping around the Pacific and the Far East for the next five years. This period included a year in Peking and a five-week stretch of detention under "house arrest" by the Russians during a trip into Manchuria to report on the movement of heavy industry to the Soviet.

At the outbreak of the Korean war, Dowling was back reporting in Chicago, and, says he, "I began to get itchy feet." Dowling's itch coincided with a TIME decision to open a Southeast Asia bureau, and he was hired for that assignment. Setting up a news bureau out there, says Dowling, "was just a matter of finding a place to hang your hat. I picked Singapore principally because the cable facilities were good." As it turned out, Singapore was literally not much more than a place to hang the Dowling hat. "I averaged only about two weeks out of every ten in Singapore. My news beat was four countries, three of which were engaged in war--Indo-China, Indonesia and Malaya. Thailand was the 'peaceful' country."

In addition to his week-by-week stories, it was Dowling's job in the three years to send in battlefield background for three TIME cover stories: Generals De Lattre and Navarre of Indo-China, General Templer of Malaya.

One trip which Dowling fondly remembers took him to the east coast of Malaya to a palm-fringed beach lapped by the South China Sea. It is a resort beach called Pantai Chinta Berahi ("The Beach of Passionate Love"), named and operated by an ex-member of Siamese royalty. While there, Dowling met and was entertained by the ruling Sultan of Kelantan, whose hobby is collecting cars. "The Sultan spoke no English, but he knew I was an American and Americans make automobiles. I'd say to him: 'I'm glad to be here.' He'd answer: 'Cadillac.' I'd say: 'It's a wonderful party.' He'd answer: 'Chevrolet.' That's the way the evening went."

There were two places in Southeast Asia which Dowling really wanted to visit: Bali and Angkor Vat. "I once got to Bali, had been there a day when a riot broke out in Jakarta and I had to leave. I once almost reached Angkor Vat when orders caught up with me to rush to Hanoi."

Another place which Dowling has not seen, but is looking forward to, is Argentina. Next month, with passport a bit larger still, he leaves New York to become TIME'S new bureau chief in Buenos Aires.

Cordially yours,

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.