When Canada's Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent left last month on his round-the-world tour (TIME, Feb. 15), Associate Editor Edwin Copps of TIME'S Canada section was assigned to cover part of the trip. Rather than take the entire six-week tour. Copps flew west to pick up the Prime Minister and party at the halfway point, follow him through India and Ceylon and to the Canadian troops in Korea. The result was some good firsthand reporting and a thorough workout for Copps.

From Colombo, Copps cabled: "An assignment to cover the activities of a 72-year-old tourist might seem a soft touch. It is anything but soft when that tourist is Prime Minister St. Laurent, who must certainly be one of the world's most energetic septuagenarians. In India and Ceylon he has been following a 15-hours-a-day schedule of official functions, sightseeing and shopping. The amount of shopping he and his party have done is best seen on the manifest of the Royal Canadian Air Force plane. There were 70 pieces of luggage on board when the plane left Ottawa; at the halfway point in Ceylon the count had risen to 110.

"As a sightseer, the Prime Minister makes Baedeker look like a shy homebody. On this, his first visit to Asia, he has been especially taken by the continent's antiquities, as compared to the newness of things in Canada. Nothing seems to please him more, or wear out his aides faster, than a visit to the ruins and relics of these ancient civilizations. Not content with merely a leisurely glimpse, he wants to visit upstairs and down in all the buildings, with an archeologist at his side to answer a barrage of questions. At Agra, India, the other day, he spent more than five hours and must have walked from 10 to 15 miles examining the Taj Mahal and the ruins of Fatehpur Sikri, built by Emperor Akbar. Before the Prime Minister was midway through, I and the others in the party were beginning to feel like some of Akbar's laborers after a day of lugging marble slabs to the roof of a new mosque."

Although this was also Copps's first visit to the Far East, he felt right at home with the Prime Minister's party. Born in Eganville, Ontario, near Ottawa, Copps has had long experience covering Canadian affairs, wrote TIME'S cover story on St. Laurent (TIME, Sept. 12, 1949).

Copps got his first full-time job at the age of 16 in the Mclntyre gold mine in Timmins, Ont. It was during the Depression; the price of gold had jumped from $20.67 to $35 an ounce, and he earned $45 a week as a drill bit sharpener. Three years later, he met a man by the name of Roy Thomson (TIME, Sept. 14, 1953), who had bought and turned the local weekly into a daily called the Timmins Press. Copps got a cub reporter's job at $8 a week. In four years he was news editor. He then left to go to the Ottawa Journal, which wanted a French-speaking reporter. After a year, Thomson made an offer: come back to Timmins as managing editor of his paper. Copps, then 23 years old, accepted, and in 1945 Publisher Thomson financed him through a year at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in New York.

At the end of the year, a call came from a group of journalists in Jamaica for an editor to help instruct them in the methods of North American journalism. Copps went to Jamaica as man aging editor of the Jamaica Express. At first the instruction was somewhat forceful. Labor Leader Bustamante was all for having Copps thrown off the island because of frank reporting by "a hardheaded Canadian.'' However, they later became friends and "settled many problems over pink gins in the patio of the Myrtle Bank Hotel."

After this hitch, Copps returned to Toronto to be editorial director of Thomson's chain of eight papers, later managing editor of New Liberty magazine. He left to come to TIME in 1948 as a Canada news writer.

Now the senior writer in TIME'S Canada section, Copps visits Canada as often as possible. After one recent trip, he admitted that he had finally discov ered one of Canada's famed sports --the art of dry-fly fishing. When he lived there, he had been too busy to try it out.

Cordially yours,

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