A Letter From The Publisher: Nov. 19, 1965

REPORTERS, writers, editors and photographers usually are—and should be—observers and analyzers rather than participants. Last week, when the biggest blackout in history hit the Northeastern U.S., the newsmen found themselves very much part of the story they were covering.

Our cover, focusing on the most critically hit area, New York City, is a montage of scenes representative of those now indelibly imprinted on the memories of people who lived through the dark. The dramatic X like view of auto lights illuminating Times Square is the work of Photographer Henry Grossman, who, burdened with equipment, climbed 17 flights until he got the view he wanted of the intersection of Broad way and Seventh Avenue at 45th Street. He had already caught the barbershop scene, with its air of a 19th century cartoon. The top two photographs on the left were taken by Mike Smith, who, fortunately, hadn’t quite made it to the subway when the lights went out. He walked across Manhattan to the Hudson Tube station and along the way shot the candlelit lobby of the Sheraton-Atlantic Hotel and—one of the char acteristic scenes of the evening—a girl in the Tube station making a telephone call by candlelight.

When the power expired, so did our national and international Tele printer operations, just then gearing to send out some 120 story queries to bureaus around the world. The communications staff turned to the telephone, which, thanks to 24 wet-cell stand-by batteries, worked. First call was to Tokyo, where, with a 14-hour time lead, the week was well under way. Tokyo staffers copied the telephone queries for the bureau as well as those for relay to Hong Kong, Manila and other Far Eastern news centers. Calls to Paris, Bonn and London followed.

While they didn’t necessarily know at the time just what they were going to do with the story, the writers, researchers and editors directly responsible for the cover story got a good deal of personal feeling for it. Michael Demarest, THE NATION editor, was on his way home on the train to Croton-on-Hudson when power failed and the train ground to a halt about a mile north of Yonkers. He walked the mile, managed to get a cab home, and watched his children toasting marshmallows in the fireplace and 13-year-old Michelle, after the manner of another century, doing her homework by firelight. Writer Ron Kriss surveyed the situation—and spent the night in his office. Ed Shook, stalled in a commuter train in Grand Central, finally made it home to Larchmont in a rented car at 4 a.m. Bruce Henderson arrived at his home in Glen Ridge, N.J., shortly after the lights went out in New York, and spent a well-lit evening just outside the blackout area.

Researchers who worked on the story (Dorothea Bourne, Raissa Silverman and Linda Young) moved through the New York City pattern —with Raissa’s evening reflecting the spirit that animated New Yorkers during the blackout. She had invited four friends to dinner at her tenth-floor apartment. When darkness hit, she phoned, advising them not to come, and invited the neighbors, who were drinking coffee in the hallway by candlelight, to come to dinner.

Everywhere, people worked out ways to solve the problem, but in few places more ingeniously than among the men who handle one of Time Inc.’s newest processes. In the Photo Department—where type is set on film and assembled into pages with wax as an adhesive—the photocomposition men poured the warm wax into coffee tins and cups and then implanted pieces of string for wicks. Presto: candles! What will those men of advanced technology think of next?