LETTER FROM THE PUBLISHER
On page 81 you will find Edwin Shrake's account of the Monzon-Briscoe fight in Buenos Aires, the second—and perhaps second most interesting—fight held in that city recently, the other being Shrake's with a guy in a waterfront saloon. Last month, in the course of his investigation of Monzon's early life, Shrake happened to place his spectacles upon a bar. A moment later he was both surprised and disappointed to see someone walking off with them. As Shrake functions better when he can see, he gave chase, a scuffle ensued and two Argentine policemen materialized to take him off, a gun in his stomach, to the local calaboose. After two days there with no food, he managed to sneak out a message via a Portuguese mariner to Photographer Roy DeCarava. DeCarava called the TIME bureau, the bureau called a lawyer and the lawyer sprang Shrake in time to finish the Monzon profile (SI, Oct. 30).
The anecdote is disturbing, but the reaction around here was a rush of nostalgia and a rash of "Do you remembers?" There was the time Whitney Tower got thrown in the pokey in Lexington, Ky. before the Derby for a "driving infraction," if that is what you call dozing off and zipping across a grass divider, crossing two on-coming lanes and jumping a ditch to stop inches short of a Calumet Farm fence. It took Admiral Gene Markey of Calumet and Leslie Combs of Spendthrift Farm to spring Whit in time for him to write his Derby preview. And then there was the time Coles Phinizy was arrested along with Ginny Kraft and her husband for diving in January under the ice of a New York City reservoir—"You don't scuba dive in New York City's drinking water, buddy." And the year that Photographer Neil Leifer was arrested in Louisville for setting up his strobes and cameras in what a cop said was the wrong place at the NCAA basketball finals. "I got out minutes before the game and shot Lew Alcindor for a cover," Leifer remembers.
Typically, journalistic confrontations with the law arise when a policeman says, "You can't go in [or over, or up] there" to a stubborn journalist who is going to go in. or over, or up there. More often than not the journalist has authorization, a fact which can be more annoying than soothing to a zealous cop. "It was just the usual thing," says Photographer Jerry Cooke of the time an Italian policeman shoved him off an Alp at Cortina. "Then, in Chile, they didn't let me go where I felt I had a right to go, and since there were so many of them, I called them Fascists, whereupon one of them spat upon me and they banned me from the slope. They said I was impugning the honor of the Chilean army."
Thus it is that a managing editor sleeps as a mother sleeps, with an ear cocked for the voice of her babe, only his ear is cocked for the sound of the telephone and a voice out of the night saying it needs bail.
Lest the reader think that the SI masthead is naught but a list of names transplanted from police blotters the world over, let it also be known that Barbara La Fontaine is an honorary game warden of the state of Wyoming, Jack Olsen was for some time a deputy sheriff in Colorado and Walter ("I knocked a few heads") Bingham was a grammar school crossing guard.
ILLUSTRATION