The Long Wait

Few editors have ever waited so long for a promotion as National Geographic Associate Editor John Oliver La Gorce, 73. For the last 49 years he has been second in command on the prosperous Geographic under Gilbert Grosvenor, the magazine's boss since 1899. Last week Editor La Gorce finally got what he was waiting for. The Geographic board made La Gorce editor and president to take the place of Editor Grosvenor, 78, who resigned. Grosvenor steps up to be chairman of the board of trustees of the Geographic, which he has built from a tiny monthly with 900 circulation to a magazine with more than 2,000,000 subscribers.

A Geographic staffer since 1905, La Gorce is as much a part of the magazine as its trademarked, yellow-bordered cover. The walls of his cyprus-paneled office in the Geographic's museumlike building on Washington's 16th Street are lined with trophies -- an elephant's foot, a 13th century crusader's sword, a caveman's club--from his years of globetrotting. (In port cities, La Gorce makes straight for the pawnshops, often finds valuable trinkets that sailors have pawned.) Mountains in Alaska and the Antarctic bear his name, as do an island and a golf course on Florida's Biscayne Bay.

Born in Scranton, Pa., La Gorce has been interested in geography and wildlife since childhood. In 1905 he was writing a column on geography, syndicated to 17 U.S. newspapers, when he was hired by the National Geographic Society at $60 a month as assistant secretary. La Gorce became a recognized authority on fresh and saltwater fish, edited the magazine's famed Book of Fishes. With his wife, a champion high school speller who still reads every word he writes to correct spelling errors, he has visited almost every country in the world except Russia. He plans no changes in the Geographic, still feels it has a job "to satisfy the human thirst for accurate information about people, places and things."

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