DURING more than 30 years as Latin teacher and football coach at Long Island's Woodmere Academy, Poet-Classicist Rolfe Humphries taught his football players something more than buck-lateral strategy. Interested in everything from foreign news to theater, he showed them that a writer is well served by wide interests. One skinny end on the 1935 team learned the lesson particularly well.

Humphries' football end, now TIME'S Associate Editor Richard Seamon, wrote this week's cover story on Actress Anne Bancroft, has written at least 14 other covers on subjects as dissimilar as Air Force Space Physician John Paul Stapp (MEDICINE, Sept. 12, 1955), Yankee Orator Casey Stengel (SPORT, Oct. 3, 1955), and TV's glib-jib Private Eyes (Snow BUSINESS, Oct. 26). On TIME since 1951, he has contributed to almost every section of the magazine, handled the Sport section for three years (1955-58), and helped inaugurate the Show Business section with a cover story on Jack Paar (Aug. 18, 1958). Dick Seamon demonstrates what a weekly magazine must demand of its writers: a specialist's thoroughness combined with a varied knowledgeability.

After Woodmere, Seamon went to Yale, majored in English, went out for boxing, developed his writing in Professor John Berdan's daily-theme course. Commissioned a Marine lieutenant on graduation in 1940 (he is now a retired light colonel), he was in flight school on Dec. 7, 1941. After a series of courses in radar and electronics at Harvard and M.I.T., Pilot Seamon was assigned to a photo-mapping outfit. At the controls of a PB4Y-I, he and his crew dodged flack and fought off enemy fighters to make a map for the invasion of Guam.

At war's end, he entered Columbia Law School, but decided after five months that the law was not for him. Before coming to TIME, he wrote reports for the Rand Corp. and Republic Aviation, read unsolicited fiction for The New Yorker.

With his wife and two sons, Writer Seamon lives in Port Washington, L.I., talks from his den to people all over the world through his single-sideband amateur radio station. One result of his hobby: putting through phone "patches" so servicemen overseas can talk to their families; last month he helped a professor in South Africa get a message to his son in The Bronx.

In doing this week's cover story, Writer Seamon drew on 40,000 words of research from Show Business Reporters Serrell Hillman, Dorothea Bourne and Ruth Brine, who spent a total of 30 hours with their subject. Dick Seamon, a newsman who can write equally well about Willie Mays, Shirley MacLaine or Anne Bancroft, epitomizes TIME'S regard for versatility and breadth, is a modern, journalistic example of the sort of writer Ben Jonson admired some 350 years ago. Wrote Jonson: "And though a man be more prone and able for one kind of writing than another, yet he must exercise all."

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