MARSH CLARK was the star pitcher for the St. James School in Maryland, although all he really had was a curve. His fastball was so slow that it tended to delay the game. That hardly qualifies Chicago Correspondent Clark as an expert on baseball, but one thing that helped to make him the right man to report this week's cover story is the fact that he is the TIME editorial staff's No. 1 baseball fan.

Marsh has been going to ball games since he was old enough to tell a ball from a bat. He considers his first allegiance to the Cardinals, since he was born in St. Louis, and his second to the Senators, since he grew up in Washington.* But he has a transferred loyalty to the Baltimore Orioles, because--as many fans may want to forget--the Orioles are in fact the old St. Louis Browns gone east and up. So, in a way, Marsh could hardly call last week work. It was off to Baltimore for a game with the Chicago White Sox, then to Minnesota for the series with the Twins and out to Los Angeles for the games with the Angels. He talked to Hank Bauer and the birds, as well as Oriole General Manager Lee MacPhail, in the dugout, on buses, planes and in dressing rooms. And in the end he was showing symptoms of becoming an Oriole fanatic.

The rest of the cover-story team provided a considerable balance of sentiment. SPORT Researcher Geraldine Kirshenbaum was a baseball fan until she was twelve, but now she'd rather go skydiving. SPORT Writer Charles Parmiter has become judiciously nonpartisan, although he has to control certain anti-Yankee tendencies. On the other hand, Senior Editor George Daniels, a sometime Little League coach, is a dyed-in-the-stripes Yankee man who can tell you about the day he saw Babe Ruth hit a home run.

Artist Boris Chaliapin, who painted the cover, frankly does not feel a very deep commitment to baseball. But he likes birds.

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All of the pictures for this week's color pages in THE WORLD were taken by Manhattan Photographer J. Alex Langley who, in 17 days of shooting, found himself rained in almost half the time. That gave him time to shop in Tokyo, and guess what he bought? A Mamiya press model, which becomes the 15th in his set of working cameras. Just to break it in properly, he used it to take the picture that became the first color page, shooting from a helicopter at 200-ft. altitude with a 150-mm. telephoto lens.

sb We're not making any promises, girls, but simply passing along a comment from Hans Stern, Latin America's leading jeweler (see BUSINESS, A Man of Many Facets), who married the girl after just three dates. Says the King of Diamonds: "I fell in love with her because she could beat me at chess and discuss TIME intelligently."

*Marsh is a grandson of Champ Clark, onetime Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, and a son of Bennett Champ Clark, onetime U.S. Senator from Missouri. He is part of a rare TIME pair: he and NATION Editor Champ Clark are brothers.

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