I recently returned to Marseille for the first time in over four decades, and came away wondering how I could have waited so long to go back.

My first visit was an odd stroke of luck. When I was a socially dysfunctional, meagerly put-together high school student, I won an essay contest sponsored by the executive club of American Export Lines. Today any thought of my juvenile take on "American Shipping in Today's World" makes me wince, but in 1962 my composition satisfied judges who awarded me a summer aboard a freighter bound for ten European ports of call.