When Correspondent Robert Schulman was transferred from TIME'S Chicago bureau last November to become chief of the bureau in Seattle, he recalled an incident that happened during a school vacation 20 years ago at the Chicago World's Fair. Says Schulman : "At the time, I was a native New Yorker who had never been west of Jersey before. I remember standing wistfully in the Chicago railroad yards watching the trains pull out for the West. I thought how wonderful it would be to go into those mighty spaces that I knew only from maps."

By now Schulman has filled in most of those map spaces by personal visits in reporting TIME stories. With the help of part-time correspondents, he covers a beat that includes the entire Pacific Northwest to the Continental Divide, up through Western Canada, and Alaska.

When he first learned that he was going to Seattle, Schulman had a plan. Says he: " I was going to get to know this area by taking a leisurely trip, soaking up the geography and meeting some of the people who are shaping the region's course. I still aim to make such a trip. The last leisurely trip I had was the train ride that brought us from Chicago.

That leisurely trip ended when Schulman & family checked into their Seattle hotel room to find a query from New York. Before his wife and daughter had finished unpacking their bags, Schulman was busy digging up the Seattle end of the story on the crisis in the Alaskan salmon fishing and packing industry. The next day came another assignment, which called for equipment that Schulman never before had needed in his 17 years of metropolitan news reporting: high boots. Alaskan mukluks, parka and long underwear. With this gear he flew to Victoria, B.C., drove 135 miles across Vancouver Island to catch a float plane to keep a rendezvous with a boatload of seagoing missionaries on their Christmas visit to the isolated settlers on the island's West Coast.

Says Schulman: "On that week-long missionary jaunt, when the sea got rough and the craft started to heave and roll through the reefs like a Coney Island roller coaster, the Gospel-quoting skipper began to sing My Heart Is Full of Joy. I joined in--the best seasickness preventive yet." Faced with one fast-breaking story after another, the Schulmans spent Christmas in their hotel, finally moved into a house on the first of the year. But since then the house has seen little of Schulman.

"To a reporter," says Schulman, "the Northwest is like the surface of a great lake full of hot springs. Everywhere you look there are hot bubbles popping up." One of the big stories bubbling to be told was that of the construction empire of Harry Morrison (TIME, May 3), whose headquarters are in Boise, Idaho. Schulman took off on this story in mid-January. It kept him busy almost exclusively through mid-March (except for side trips to Alaska and the interior of Washington state for other stories) on trips to Boise, San Francisco and British Columbia.

At the end, Schulman had collected 10 Ibs. of research, a list of worldwide sources for other TIME correspondents to tap, and the comment from Morrison that Reporter Schulman now knew enough about the business to hire on as a construction stiff.

Schulman declined the offer in favor of remaining a reporter covering the news of the Pacific Northwest. Says he: "Not only is the country big, but so are the achievements and plans of the people. And the people want you to see what they have done, from the biggest operator down to the gyppologger or the settler who is living in a tent and farming 160 irrigated acres in the Columbia Basin. And in seeing some of this, you get the gnawing feeling that you are never going to catch up with the immensity of the development out here." Cordially yours,

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.