In December 1949, a 23-year-old man dropped anchor in Port-au-Prince aboard a sailboat carrying equipment loaded a few days earlier in Florida. His camera disappeared during the stopover. He went into the city to look for it, did not find it, but discovered something else. He signaled to his traveling companions to continue without him and stayed behind. Thus began the story of one of the journalists who left the greatest mark on Haiti and the Caribbean in the 20th century.

A few months after his arrival, he founded Haiti Sun, the first English-language weekly published in Haiti. For 14 years, from 1950 to 1963, the newspaper gave a voice to the country’s English-speaking community and served as a window onto Haitian current affairs for foreign readers, who at the time had few other sources of information. One of his first investigations, devoted to a woman who had turned a small poultry operation into a hatchery, led him to his future wife, Ginette Dreyfuss. The couple married and remained together for 57 years.