LETTER FROM THE PUBLISHER

Senior editor Margaret Sieck shifted uneasily at her table in a Greenwich Village restaurant last Thursday night. She bolted her coffee, then waited expectantly for her dinner companions to do likewise. Game 4 of the Stanley Cup finals was about to start, and Sieck wasn't going to let it start without her.

It was the first day of our editorial workweek—if it's Thursday, it must be Monday—and the week promised, as usual, few breaks for Sieck, whose responsibilities include hockey, sailing, rowing, volleyball and assorted games. She would be editing two stories for the special Olympic preview issue we'll put out in July, as well as our current piece on the Oilers' trouncing of the Islanders (page 28). Sieck arrived home to the final strains of O Canada! and caught the entire 7-2 drubbing of the Islanders on TV.

The week before, she had edited part of our package of stories on the Soviet Olympic withdrawal. The week before that, it had been more hockey, sailor-adventurer Tristan Jones and more Olympics. She also was scheduled to attend a Saturday meeting of the board of trustees of the Northfield Mount Hermon School in Northfield, Mass., which she did. School boards make no concessions to the Thursday-Monday week, but Sieck, our juggling editor, is nothing if not agile.

Northfield Mount Hermon, with nearly 1,200 students, is one of the country's largest boarding schools. Its alumni include Frank Shorter '65, Bette Davis, long rumored to have been expelled for smoking, and Sieck, head of the student government in 1971-72. She's serving her second five-year term on the 32-member board (which also includes Time Inc. president and CEO J. Richard Munro). When Sieck attended a board meeting last October, she stayed at the home of Deane Lanphear, former NMH hockey coach and now the school's director of development. After returning a call from the SI office, Sieck sought out Lanphear. "Guess who's the new hockey editor?" she said. "You're kidding," he replied.

She wasn't. "When I went upstairs to pack, I was somewhat dismayed that my good news hadn't been better received," she says. "But when I came downstairs, Deane and his son were holding crossed hockey sticks for me to walk under."

Sieck has been under the spell of the game ever since. "I sometimes get so caught up watching the flow of the action and admiring the grace with which players maneuver that I forget that I'm supposed to be looking for something specific," says Sieck, who watches many an NHL game on tape. "I find the sport captivating."

Indeed, after the latest trustee meetings, the game held her captive in SI's offices until 3 a.m. of our issue-closing night, Sunday; this week it was 5 a.m. "We've met at the door before," her husband, Bob Baldwin, an assistant vice-president at Citicorp, says. "At eight a.m. I'll be walking out with my briefcase, and she'll be walking in with hers."

For Sieck it was another case of TGIM—thank God it's Monday.

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SIECK: FROM THE BOARD ITS BACK TO THE BOARDS