LETTER FROM THE PUBLISHER

Next week this magazine will announce the names of the 26 men who have been selected for SPORTS ILLUSTRATED'S 1966 Silver Anniversary Awards. Twenty-five years after playing their last college football games, they are being honored for the contributions they have made to American life—contributions that range over an area wide enough to include science, medicine, education, law, politics and business. The selections demonstrate once again that a good football record in college does not condemn one to an anti-intellectual career thereafter.

The story of the award winners, however, will be told in next week's issue. This week I want to express my thanks to a group of men who made the success of the Silver Anniversary Awards possible: the judges. Those who selected the 26 men for the 1966 awards were:

Paul Bryant, Athletic Director of the University of Alabama; TURNER CATLEDGE, Executive Editor of The New York Times; HOWARD L. CLARK, President of the American Express Company; ALLEN DULLES, attorney, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency; BARRY GOLD WATER, former Senator from Arizona; GORDON GRAND, President of the Olin Mathieson Chemical Corporation: HARDING L. LAWRENCE, President of Braniff International Airways; T. VINCENT LEARSON, President of International Business Machines Corporation; GEORGE LOVE, recently retired Chairman of the Chrysler Corporation; THOMAS B. MCCABE, Chairman of the Scott Paper Company; THE REV. JOHN COURTNEY MURRAY, S.J., Professor of Systematic Theology, Woodstock College; PIERRE SALINGER, Vice-President of Continental Airlines.

In the early days of the awards the editors of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED were a little timid about asking some of the busiest and most distinguished men in America to serve on the panel of judges. They discovered, to their pleasure, that any such worry was unfounded. President Kennedy, then a Senator from Massachusetts, cheerfully gave his time to vote for the candidates presented by the colleges. General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, former Vice-President Richard Nixon, Red Grange, West Point Coach Red Blaik, Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, and Novelist John P. Marquand were among the original judges.

Perhaps we underestimated the habits of mind that men in their position brought to the task of evaluating character and achievement. Perhaps the colleges cooperated more fully than we had expected in detailing the accomplishments of distinguished alumni. In any case, the task of being a judge required a lot of reading. The citations (which came from colleges of all sizes in all parts of the country), for instance, were bound into books, and this year's volume ran to 196 pages. It seems to me to be particularly significant that the heads of major corporations in America have freely donated their time to read the nominations and mark their ballots. Tom Watson of IBM, Roger Blough of U.S. Steel and Harlow Curtice of General Motors were on the first panel of judges in 1956. Their successors in the next decade included William Allen of Boeing, Lester Colbert of Chrysler, Henry Davison of Morgan Guaranty Trust, Raymond Firestone of Firestone Tires, Benson Ford of Ford Motors, Arthur Houghton of Steuben Glass, Lewis Maytag of National Airlines and Senator-elect Charles Percy, who was then head of Bell & Howell. The officers of Eastern Air Lines, Bausch & Lomb, Goodyear Tire & Rubber, Sears, Roebuck, Philip Morris, Dow Chemical and American Telephone and Telegraph were also among the judges and, in fact, it would be hard to find an important American business whose representatives were not included. This magazine is proud to have been associated with them, as it is proud of having played a part in honoring the men they have chosen.