The torpid days of August normally find Wall Street sleepily idling, while many traders head off to summer hideaways. And it might have made sense for TIME New York Financial Correspondent Frederick Ungeheuer to do the same. But fortunately, when the stock market unexpectedly exploded last week, Ungeheuer was on hand to enjoy and chronicle the fireworks.

He had begun the week with a 16-hour day, talking across time zones to vacationing sources for a previously scheduled business story. He was finishing up his report Tuesday morning when he noticed on his cable-news tape that "the stock market was clearly up to something unusual--and big." Putting aside his assigned story, he immediately started calling his Wall Street sources, including Expert Albert Wojnilower, whose predictions about falling interest rates had helped touch off the market's buying frenzy. That story was still evolving when Ungeheuer had to deal with news that Citicorp was bidding for the Fidelity Savings & Loan Association. "I had seen the move coming two years ago, when Citicorp Chairman Walter Wriston indicated to me that Citibank would be reaching out for a savings and loan at the earliest opportunity," said Ungeheuer. He went to work on the Citicorp story as well. In the meantime, TIME'S editors decided a separate story was needed on interest rates to augment the Wall Street coverage; Ungeheuer was asked to contribute to that. Then on Thursday, "I had to start reporting on rumors about Mexico's threatened default and its impact." Ungeheuer brought years of deadline experience in foreign and financial reporting to his rugged workout last week. And he could draw on sources developed when he was TIME'S European economic correspondent and when he worked for Chase Manhattan Bank editing two international business newsletters. A West German-born foreign exchange student who came to the U.S. in 1950 to go to Milwaukee's Pulaski High School, Ungeheuer went on to become a Phi Beta Kappa graduate in government from Harvard. After working for Reuters as a foreign correspondent, he joined TIME'S Paris bureau in 1963. His most frenzied week working abroad came when he visited four countries in Africa in 48 hours ("literally by plane, Land Rover and dugout canoe") to report a late-breaking 1967 story on tribalism after Biafra's secession from Nigeria. His most draining assignment: seven months in Czechoslovakia covering the crushing of the 1968 Prague Spring by the Soviets. "We often wrote with tears in our eyes there," he remembers.

"Compared with the way we had to cover stories in those days, this week on Wall Street was relatively civilized."

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