From the Managing Editor

By Henry Muller

This special issue on California fulfills a long-standing ambition of mine: to explain this amazing state to a national and international audience that knows it better for its cliches than for its complexity. My colleagues jokingly say I'm interested mainly because I grew up in San Francisco. I suppose there's some truth to that, if only because the changes in the state are all the more overwhelming to someone who knew it in the 1950s and '60s.

Any biases I may have were offset by senior editor Jack White, a North Carolinian who got some exposure to the Golden State when he lived in Fresno in the '60s. Jack put this issue together with the expert guidance of executive editor Ron Kriss, who still regrets leaving the home he owned in Sausalito when he lived there as executive editor of Saturday Review in the early 1970s.

Most of the stories were written and reported by our correspondents and reporters in Los Angeles and San Francisco, under the supervision of West Coast bureau chief Jordan Bonfante. Jordan first lived in Los Angeles in the late '60s, when he was bureau chief for LIFE magazine; he returned three years ago after a foreign career that had taken him to London, Rome and Paris. "How much farther from Europe can you get?" he asks. For San Francisco bureau chief Paul Witteman, the assignment was especially nostalgic: he moves to New York as deputy chief of correspondents this week after a total of eight years (in two stints) in the City by the Bay. Of all the photographers represented in this issue, none was more thrilled by the assignment than P.F. Bentley, a resident of Stinson Beach, Calif.

As we were completing this issue, we received sad news: a dear colleague, Robert T. Zintl Jr., 44, died suddenly on Tuesday working in his office in Rome, where he was bureau chief. Terry, as his friends called him, went to Italy a year ago after five years editing in our Nation section and nine months as deputy managing editor of the New York Daily News. Terry was a natural journalist, always curious and professional, devoted to his family, a gracious and cheerful presence in the Time & Life Building in New York City and on the Via Sardegna in Rome. We will miss him immensely.