A Letter From The Publisher, Dec. 16, 1946

So far this year 274 of the news stories TIME has printed have been contributed (or substantially contributed to) by our Chicago news bureau. Of all TIME’S 13 domestic bureaus (whose function is to give TIME its own intimate coverage of nationally interesting local news). Chicago has the most difficult geographical assignment. Its territory extends west to the Black Hills of the Dakotas, south as far as Oklahoma.

To cover the news (from politics to art) in this great slice of the American Midwest requires not only the expert services of reporters in Minneapolis, Omaha, Kansas City, Des Moines, etc., but also demands plenty of travel from Chicago’s five-man staff. Indicative of this kind of personal coverage are these anecdotes from Chicago reporters James Bell, Serrell Hillman and Eleanor Steinert:

Bell was in Omaha examining the Nebraska senatorial race when Chicago telephoned to pick up UNRRA’s Fiorello LaGuardia in Fargo, N.Dak., before noon the next day. After badgering two airlines into getting him there, sleepless, by 5:30 a.m., he was on hand to meet LaGuardia at the airport, rescue his hat from the prairie wind, and go with him to Climax, Minn. Bell managed to catch a few hours’ sleep in the sample room of a local hotel.

When a photographer tried to get LaGuardia to pose in a truckload of wheat, he refused, saying: “It’ll hurt the wheat.” “Won’t it?” he asked, turning to Bell. “No,” said Bell, “farmers often pack it that way.” “How do you know?” LaGuardia demanded. Said Bell: “I’m from Kansas.” “Well,” LaGuardia decided. “I won’t stand in it. It’ll look silly.” So he didn’t stand in it.

When mystery story writer Craig Rice was covering the Heirens murder story for a Chicago paper, Hillman called to get some dope on her assignment, was invited to go along on “a terrific clue that may break the case.” It turned out to be some strange pencil scribblings on a package that one of Rice’s readers had received from Sears, Roebuck and Co. It was, of course, a dud.

Steinert likes to recall the embarrassment she underwent in being misquoted about music czar James Caesar

Petrillo. Petrillo had told her: “We don’t want any victories or any fights. We just want to live.” The copy, garbled in transit by Western Union, which was on strike, came out in TIME : “We just want to love.” When Steinert sought to placate Petrillo by suggesting that the mistake might not have happened if the communications company had not been struck, he laughed and bellowed : “That’s right ; these damn unions are gonna ruin the country!”

And so it goes, so far as the Chicago bureau is concerned. It was the need for this kind of local-national coverage that moved TIME to open its first out-of-town news bureau —in Chicago — 17 years ago. Now, under Bureau Chief Penrose Scull, it is a funnel for the news of the U.S.’s second largest city and the great slice of the Midwest stretching out from it. By virtue of being there, Chicago bureaumen, working closely with TIME correspondents in major cities within their area, can be expected to supply

TIME’S editors with the facts and the intimate details of the news, as well as the local point of view. They are also expected to know who’s who and what’s what in the specific fields (education, transportation, sports, etc.) they are assigned to cover. One specialist regularly reads some 50 local medical and scientific publications for the benefit of our Science and Medicine editors in Manhattan.

Being TIME’S oldest bureau, Chicago has the most impressive list of alumni of all our domestic bureaus. They include Walter Graebner, European Area Director for TIME-LIFE International; Eleanor Welch and Fillmore Calhoun. assistants to the Chief of Foreign Correspondents; Sidney James, LIFE’S National Affairs Editor; James McConaughy Jr., Ottawa bureau chief; Robert Sherrod, TIME’S roving correspondent in the Pacific; David Hulburd, chief of all TIME’S domestic news bureaus. Like many another TIMEman who learned his trade in the field, they have brought to their new jobs at home and abroad a first-hand knowledge of the kind of local coverage it takes to make the kind of national and world viewpoint that TIME strives for.

Cordially,