Most people get restless now and then, but among many good newsmen, restlessness is a chronic occupational malady. One reporter so afflicted is Ramelle C. MaCoy, who was sending his dispatches to TIME from Guatemala a year ago, from Korea six months later, and who will be filing his stories from Buenos Aires in a week or two. He will take over from Frank Shea, who returns to the U.S. this month after an eventful year in the Argentine capital.

MaCoy's aversion to boredom was quickly sensed by fellow correspondents in Korea. Week after week, he kept moving to different sections of the front, looking for the most active sector. For a story on a front-line neurosurgery team, he made the round trip from Seoul to Tokyo twice in one week, hitchhiking in military planes, in order to catch up with the unit's commanding officer and to interview the theater surgeon general.

That MaCoy should have been sent to Korea in the first place was almost inevitable from the way he asked for the assignment. In leftist Guatemala, his candid reporting (including his coverage of the 1949 revolution) won him many friends, but made enemies too. During the 1950 elections, he was followed constantly, and his camera was stolen from his car. Shortly afterward, when he was out of the country, the car itself was stolen. Later it was found --overturned, battered and partially burned. When we phoned him from New York because of some concern over his personal safety, MaCoy said laconically: "Things are pretty dull here, no stories breaking. When are you sending me to Korea?"

MaCoy's urge for change became evident long before he joined TIME'S staff. After attending Millsaps College, he enlisted in the Navy's aviation program. When his training seemed to be moving at a snail's pace, he transferred to the Navy Salvage School.

Separated from the Navy in New Orleans in 1946, he started out for China with a friend. They bought motorcycles for the first leg of the journey to San Francisco. En route, they took a side trip to Mexico, liked it so well that they forgot about China and enrolled at Mexico City College to study Spanish. "We were both very annoyed at being in Mexico and not being able to speak Spanish," he explained.

Late in the fall, he started down the Pan American Highway in a jeep with four other Americans, among them Katherine Wallis, whom MaCoy married the next year, and her mother. When the highway became impassable, MaCoy wanted to go on, but the others didn't. The others got on a train with the jeep; he invested $40 in a horse. After a day on horseback, he decided he preferred walking, sold the horse for $28. The second day he walked for 14 hours, changed his mind again. Eventually, after borrowing other mounts from a Maryknoll father and an American doing research work on the Mayan Indians, he arrived at the prearranged meeting point, Huehuetenango, ahead of the others.

They all went on to Guatemala City, where MaCoy went to work for a Spanish-language newspaper, then started his own newspaper, before becoming part-time correspondent for TIME. When TIME assignments began taking him away on frequent trips to El Salvador, Honduras, British Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica, he gave up his newspaper.

During one of those trips, he was treated to a good illustration of the fact that copies of TIME are likely to turn up in just as many out-of-the-way spots as TIME'S correspondents. On an assignment in the Bay Islands, MaCoy arrived tired after a hard day. He got a room at the hotel with a window overlooking the town square, and settled down in bed. He was almost asleep when he heard a loud voice outside. MaCoy walked over to the window. In the square he saw "a man reading aloud the last issue of TIME. He was sitting there with about 25 people around him, reading about Joe Louis' attempted comeback against Ezzard Charles."

Cordially yours,

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