MEMO FROM THE PUBLISHER
Some people travel for the fun of traveling and some to reach the place they have to get to. Some travel because they enjoy what they find when they get there.
The staff of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED travels for all three reasons. It would be a hard life for a writer or reporter on SPORTS ILLUSTRATED who plain disliked travel—because it almost goes without saying that wherever sports are he must sooner or later be. (And this, as far as we can tell, is true too of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED readers.)
I started this with the thought that, in the two years which we celebrate with this Anniversary Issue, our staff has become as widely traveled a group as one would want to pick out of a hat. They have been to five continents, seven seas and stopped at a few way stations-moved by almost every conveyance known to man, including such conventional carriers as planes, trains and ships, and others less familiar, like camels and donkeys, tongas, rickshaws, pedicabs and a balloon.
One of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED's most recently returned travelers is Gerald Holland. He took a trip of about 2,000 miles, starting from Manhattan (where he lives) to Annapolis on the shore of Chesapeake Bay. Then he went to Martha's Vineyard, on to Cuttyhunk (the smallest of the Elizabeth Islands off Massachusetts), to Cape Cod, to Freeport and Bar Harbor, Me., to Ithaca, N.Y., New Haven, Conn., New Brunswick, N.J. and then to Montauk, Long Island. Holland traveled by essentially ordinary means, although it was out of the ordinary when a Martha's Vineyard—and very Yankee—storekeeper accepted him as a hitchhiker on the strictly business voyage he now and then makes to replenish his store on Cuttyhunk.
From the itinerary it might be hard to tell what Holland was up to. It may help to know that for some years he had been a partly practicing and completely frustrated striped bass fisherman; he was pursuing the striped bass in its haunts and through the minds of the scholars who have studied this strangely elusive fish.
Those who seek stripers are in a class by themselves and track their quarry with the singleness of purpose Captain Ahab spent on Moby Dick. In next week's SPORTS ILLUSTRATED Gerald Holland, with his own singleness of purpose, begins his two-part story: The Striped Bass: An Investigation.
It is a story about a certain type of fisherman, but for all men; a story with its own comic pathos, a tale of frustration and—. It has a surprising and yet heartening end. Even if it took 2,000 miles to reach, Holland would be the first to say it was worth every inch of the way.
THREE ILLUSTRATIONS