47 Years Ago in TIME

Where's JIMMY HOFFA? The FBI search of a Michigan farm may help solve that mystery. Even before the Teamster boss vanished in 1975, his doings were cloaked in secrecy, despite Congress's inquiries.

Hoffa once tried to sum up in four short sentences his career after he left school at the end of the seventh grade: "I got a job in a department store--stock boy. Then I got a job at Kroger's. And that's my whole life. Pretty simple life." It was a lot more complicated than that. But in one sense Hoffa's career indeed followed a simple line: straight up the ladder of labor-union power ... Hoffa's rise to power and the uses he has made of it are detailed and documented in the McClellan committee record, sprawling over 44,000 pages of testimony ... But for all its awesome bulk, the record has some significant gaps: committee investigators found that many Teamster documents, including all records of Hoffa's own Local 299 for the years prior to 1953, had been destroyed or hidden. Most of the important Teamster officials who testified ducked behind the Fifth Amendment. Hoffa himself never took the Fifth, but he displayed what one Senator called "the best forgettery of anyone I have ever known." TIME, Aug. 31, 1959