CONTRIBUTING EDITOR DEMAREST

Dear TIME-Reader:

WHEN Contributing Editor Michael --(TM) Demarest wrote this week's cover story on Greek Shipping Magnate Stavros Spyros Niarchos and the boom in postwar shipping, he brought to his subject an understanding and feeling that came from long personal experience at sea. Mike spent three of the World War II years sailing in all classes of merchantmen, but mostly in tankers, about the Atlantic and Pacific.

Former Tankerman Demarest went down to sea in ships along an unusual route. Born 32 years ago on Long Island, he was sent to England for his education by a grandfather who was an ardent Anglophile. The processing began at a Spartan boarding school in Berkshire, where he was drilled with a wooden rifle at sunup by a World War I sergeant major, introduced to Latin at eight and Greek at nine.

Later, Demarest won a scholarship and the right to occupy Tom Brown's old room at Rugby, one of the oldest of British public schools. There he revolted against concentrated study of dead languages and. between Nazi air raids on nearby Coventry, began to specialize in English literature. After classes, Mike, then a lanky teenager, carried a rifle in the Rugby Home Guard, commanded by a Greek professor who was constantly plotting the defense of the school according to the tactics of the Peloponnesian War.

Demarest was 18 and majoring in Anglo-Saxon and pre-Shakespearean drama at Oxford's Magdalen College in 1942 when he decided to return to the U.S. and help fight the war. At Liverpool he joined the crew of a U.S. freighter bound for New York. His British training hardly prepared Mike for his rugged American shipmates, but he found them so fascinating and life at sea in wartime so exciting that he signed up with the Merchant Marine soon after he landed in New York. "By the time the war ended," he said, "I just couldn't go back to Oxford and Beowulf."

Instead, he set out to discover America. For a year he edited scholarly tracts for the New York Academy of Sciences, then went west to review books for the San Francisco Argonaut, a weekly magazine of opinion. By 1952, he was a reporter and columnist for the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat, and a part-time correspondent for TIME. Two years later he returned east to work first for LIFE, then for TIME. As a TIME Business writer, he has done two other cover stories, Toymaker Louis Marx (TIME. Dec. 12) and American Express' President Reed (TIME, April 9), plus such features as "Company Towns" (TIME, April 16) and "The Age of Research'' (TIME. July 9).

"This," says Mike, "is my American education."

Cordially yours,

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