A former freelance journalist who worked in Jakarta following
the abortive October 1965 communist coup attempt relates his
numerous interesting experiences
Stringing for Time Magazine
Tom Graciano/Indonesia Media
 Our first trip was to Yogyakarta in Central Java, about one hour’s flight from Jakarta. I can’t remember the reason why we took the night train to reach our destination. Yoyakarta is the capital of a special region with the same name that used to be a sultanate during the Dutch colonial times until the early years of Indonesia’s independence. Sultan Hamengkubuwono IX, the deputy prime minister for economy and finance, was the head of the special region. The monumental Borobudur Buddhist temple, built in the ninth century and now a popular tourist attraction, is about one hour’s drive from Yogyakarta.
Our travel agent made an arrangement with a restaurant in Yogyakarta , known to serve the best Javanese dishes in the region, to prepare an assortment of dishes Eliot would be photographing in the Borobudur temple. The dishes were beautifully arranged on an elegantly decorated table, set up in the outer courtyard. The table was placed quite a distance away from the main entrance to the inner courtyard. Eliot took shots of the beautiful array of foods decorated with colorful flowers, against the backdrop of the magnificent temple.
 Our next destination was Bali, the island of paradise. Temple ceremonies in which Balinese foods are beautifully displayed take place almost every day in one village or another on the island. Beautifully dressed women carry containers on their heads with foods and fruits stacked up high on them on their way to the ceremonies. Eliot took a lot of pictures of these scenes, in addition to a specially prepared spread of dishes on a decorated buffet table photographed in the outer courtyard of a temple showing the temple in the background.
We flew to Padang, the capital of West Sumatra, next. The region boasts of its culinary delights, known throughout not only Indonesia, but also neighboring Singapore and Malaysia, as Padang cuisine. You can find restaurants serving Padang food in almost every major town and city throughout Indonesia. There are a number of them in Singapore, the best one being, in my opinion, Rendezvous on Bras Basah Road in Orchard area, and in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur. In fact, there was one in San Francisco, California, called A Bit of Indonesia. It was still in business in summer of 1976 when I had dinner there with David Ringler and his wife. David was the public relations manager of Foremost Milk at the time, an account my public relations (PR) agency in Jakarta was handling. I don’t think this restaurant is still operating now as I can’t find it in the Yellow Pages Directory, but there must be quite a few Indonesian restaurants in California serving Padang cuisine.
 In West Sumatra Eliot and I traveled to other parts of the region. We went to Bukittinggi, about an hour’s drive from Padang, where the people use more chilies in their cooking than in other parts of West Sumatra. That makes their food the hottest of all variations of the Padang cuisine. Eliot was a true gourmet. He loved eating good food and had no problem eating very hot dishes, which amazed the people watching us eating and taking pictures of the various dishes in several places we went to. In Sungai Penuh, a coastal village, we took pictures of an array of dishes served in a wedding ceremony. We ate with the people and were served young coconuts still in its whole shells and outer skins. Later on the villagers took us to a nearby coconut grove. They showed us how they ordered domesticated monkeys to climb up the coconut trees to pluck the young coconuts and drop them to the ground. Eliot took several rolls of black and white pictures of the fascinating scene.
Working with Eliot for two weeks traveling to three different Indonesian regions improved my photographic skills a lot. As a result, I sold more photos to Keystone Press and made more money out of that stringing job. Time-Life Books also paid me a generous fee for my full-time two-week assignment with Eliot. Eliot was very kind to me teaching me a lot of things about good photography. We finished our assignment in early October 1967, a month before Grace was  due to give birth to our first child. Life magazine decided to call off the Java rhino photographic stake-out in early November. So when I said goodbye to Eliot who was going back to New York, I told him I would give our child a name to remember him by. And so we named our first baby girl Elisa. Eliot died in early 1973.
Another major story I did for Time magazine was an interview with Prof. Dr. Emil Salim towards the end of 1974 assigned by Roy Rowan. Time’s Asia edition wanted to get opinions from noted Asian economists on the role oil would play in the world’s economy the following year. The editors also wanted them to come up with an economic forecast for 1975 taking into account the role of oil in the economy. The story came out in the year-end issue published either in late December 1974 ot early January 1975. At the time Time magazine didn’t put the name of the reporter or the editor who did a story published in the magazine They changed this practice in later years and gave by-lines to reporters and editors. But the Letter from the Publisher appearing in the year-end issue stated the story was written by Roy based on the report I wrote about my interview with Dr. Salim. So it was some kind of a by-line which made me quite happy.
 Salim was Minister of Communications but, as chairman of the Indonesian Economists Association, was the country’s top economist then. I had met him when he was still a member of Acting President Suharto’s team of economic advisors in 1967. Suharto appointed him to his ministerial post when he became president a year later. I arranged for Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) News correspondent Bill Cunningham to interview him on-camera for the Indonesian economic feature story he was doing in 1969.
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