A Letter From The Publisher, may 10, 1954

Dear Time-Reader AE key figure in every TIME news bureau is that highly efficient and knowledgeable girl who works under the unassuming title of secretary to the bureau chief. She is an expert in many things, from taking shorthand to running an Teletype machine. She is office manager, file clerk and general errand girl with wide contacts in the city and intimate knowledge of the files full of research. One of these indispensable staff members is Ann Stephanie Squires, secretary to TIME’S Boston Bureau Chief Jeff Wylie. Ann came to TIME in 1945 with wide political and newspaper contacts acquired as secretary of former Governor Saltonstall’s press secretary. “She has,” says Wylie, “an uncanny ear for quotes, which I envy. She keeps accounts, brews coffee, gets impossible reservations for unexpected delegations, struggles with appointments, pictures and air-express pickups. She doesn’t have the fun that we reporters do chasing news. She sits at the desk when we are in an remote corner of Maine or some other place and all the editors in New York are suddenly demanding immediate action of other projects. By quick thinking and an superb telephone manner, she manages to tie all the loose ends together.” Ann’s knowledge of languages (Lithuanian, Russian. Polish and Back Bay American) is often brought into play. Says Wylie: “The most memorable time was when we met the first D.P. ship to dock in Boston. I stood by helplessly while Ann interviewed the new Americans, who were overjoyed to hear an American speaking their language.” According to one correspondent. Ann passes the supreme test: “She can get an overdue or inaccurate expense account cleared up with less pain than any secretary in the country.” Another veteran secretary is Mary McDowall Stoll, who has been with TIME’S Detroit bureau through the past 20 years. She first came to TIME in 1934 as an switchboard operator. Bureau Chief Fred Collins describes her as a person “who does a thousand chores, mostly of a monotonous type, with the relish of a youngster watching his first big-league baseball game.” Mary agrees with the word “relish” but not “monotonous.” Says she: “I like the diversity of subjects that we handle every day-everything from automotive stories to flying saucer-men’s lectures and the occasional mur der. Best of all, perhaps, I like being on the inside of the stories that make the week’s news. There is very little boring detail in editorial work, and you feel that everything you do is important.”

Some of the details include running the Teletype machine, proofreading copy (“including correcting my spelling,” adds Collins) and taking dictation, sometimes at a marathon pace amounting to 35,000 words on a cover story. One of her longest dictation stretches was on Dday, 1944, when correspondents were alerted to report local reaction. It was an all-day running story, with Mary sitting in the office taking the copy on the phone-“one of the few times when life in a news bureau was like life on a newspaper in the movies.”

In Seattle, Bureau Chief Bob Schulman’s secretary is Sylvia Froula, who has worked for TIME since 1944. In the past ten years she has come to expect the unexpected, acting in her extra capacities of information bureau, banker, office interior decorator, chauffeur and courier. For example, she was sitting in a dentist’s chair one June day in 1950, her mouth full of clamps, when the phone rang. It was New York calling. Says she: “The dentist got his junk out of my mouth, and that was the end of the appointment. Within a few minutes, I was on my way to the airport to meet a plane from Tokyo and make arrangements to transship to New York a packet of-the first battle pictures of the Korean war.”

Correspondents have also learned to accept the unexpected from Sylvia. Says former Bureau Chief James Mc-Conaughy: “I seem to remember that she could take dictation on two pieces of research simultaneously -in shorthand with one hand, and directly onto the typewriter with the other. In between pauses, she would put in long distance phone calls about rollicking Indians in Pysht,Wash. who were making Miscellany items, balance the office expense account and placate frustrated photographers.” And, McConaughy adds, “Everybody in Seattle -and Pysht -knows Sylvia, and she knows them. Apparently all of the Pacific Northwest went to school with Sylvia.”

Cordially yours,