A Letter From The Publisher, Jul. 25, 1960

IN the quiet of a rambling house in Hyannisport, Mass, one evening last week, two young women lounged before a TV set watching history in process in Los Angeles. Periodically, the hostess daubed away at a painting, and once the two got into a thoughtful discussion about the exact shade of Dufy blue. It was, in all, a pleasant evening for Hostess Jacqueline Kennedy, wife of the Democratic presidential nominee, and TIME Correspondent Anne Chamberlin.

Washington Correspondent Cham-berlin’s assignment was just one part of a vast tapestry of intensive reporting by TIME’S staff in the rush of political events of the past few weeks—reporting that contributed to the cover stories on Jack Kennedy and his family (July 11) and Lyndon Johnson (July 18) in the two issues that preceded their nomination, and followed through for this week’s report-in-depth on the nominating convention. Thirty staffers, headquartered in the temporary TIME offices at the Biltmore Bowl in Los Angeles’ Biltmore Hotel, fanned out through corridors, caucuses, convention floor locations and delegation suites to piece together the far-flung elements of a historic week in U.S.

political history. They filed more than 135,000 words on the big news of the week (much of it transmitted via a JULY 18 new Dataphone system, which sends at the rate of 800 words per minute) and helped to produce four pages of fast color pictures that include a view of the big moment when Nominee Kennedy appeared before the convention.

In this week’s cover story on Sherman Fairchild’s interests and other growth companies, TIME revisits some old friends. As early as 1936, we reported on a young inventor named Edwin H. Land and his polarized lens; in 1947 we noted the advent of Polaroid’s remarkable 60-second camera before it was marketed. A $35 investment in Polaroid that year would now have grown to $862. Texas Instruments, now selling at 214¾, was the subject of an April 1957 story when it sold at about 20. A June 1954 story on Ampex pointed out that the boom in prerecorded tape was made possible by the company. Five dollars invested in a single share of Ampex in 1954 would now be worth $186. Similar stories have examined such rapid risers as Litton Industries (September 1958), Brunswick Corp. (September 1959), and a host of other growth companies.

In its business reporting, TIME is ever interested in spotting new and growing companies that have a promising future and can thus contribute to the growth of the nation.