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which she had managed to buy up, you see, and so it was her private property. It's since expanded to quite a sizable, perfectly beautiful place in the ridges of Eastern Pennsylvania. This is a long story on conservation, but anyway, it illustrates how I was interested in it from the very beginning and carried that on after the war.

One of the first things I did when I joined the Times -- I had been on the Washington Post before the war -- and when I joined the New York Times after the war, which I had not wanted to do until I'd had some very -- well, I was offered to -- but I didn't want to until I could prove that I really could carry a serious newspaper job. I'll get back to that in a minute. But on this environmental conservation stuff, after I'd been at the Times working in the Sunday department, which was my first job after the war, after I got out of the army -- five years of the army, I might say -- instead of returning to the Washington Post I was offered a job by the Sunday editor of the Times and I did accept that --

That was Lester Markel.

Lester Markel. And there are a lot of other things to be said about that, but I would want to say right now in this connection, that after I'd been working in the Sunday department in the “Review of the Week” section, as we call it, for a year or two, I asked Markel if we shouldn't have a conservation column. I think maybe I'd already left the “Review of the Week” and had become a member of the editorial department. The only point of my talking about this is in connection with the environment business and my own interest in it. I persuaded Lester -- yes, it was 1950 or '51 -- that since the New York Times was carrying columns on a lot less important subjects like bridge and movie reviews and