A Letter From The Publisher, Sep. 29, 1958

AFTER spending several hours kibitzing while Bridge Expert Charles Goren and Partner Helen Sobel played against another expert partnership, TIME Contributing Editor William Bowen and Correspondent Jack Olsen sat down to get their story firsthand. On the first deal, everybody passed. On the second, Sobel bid and made two spades. “Well.” said Olsen, “we can always say that after spending a whole bridge evening with Goren and Sobel, we were only 60 points behind.” For the results of that evening and countless other hours of digging by a task force of staffers who have now lost their amateur standing at the bridge table, see SPORT, King of the Aces.

SHE had a framework of security that most women can only dream of—striking beauty, social position, wealth and stardom in Hollywood. Yet in 1954 Cinemactress Gene Tierney went to pieces, and to a mental institution. Last week, back in Hollywood at last, she talked freely of the pressures that broke her down and of the heartening treatment that led to recovery. See MEDICINE, Reborn Star.

BEFORE dawn one day last week, Robert W. Glasgow of TIME’S Los Angeles bureau climbed into a red and white campaign plane piloted by Arizona’s Republican Senator Barry M. Goldwater, gulped and recalled one observer’s prediction that “one day Goldwater’s going to be scraped from a mountainside.” After a series of landings and take-offs from desert airstrips, Glasgow? was ready to predict long life for the candidate. See NATIONAL AFFAIRS. Personality Contest.

TIN Pan Alley is not a place—it is a state of mind. One of the remarkable examples of this phenomenon is the recent Hula Hoop fad, which ordinarily might not have been noticed by anyone except parents, storekeepers and sociologists, but wrhich has been turned into song. See SHOW BUSINESS, Hula Balloo.

A JAPANESE under a kimono gets as cold as a Scotsman under a kilt, and thereby hangs the warming tale of enterprise displayed by Japanese Businessman-Inventor Konosuke Matsushita. Disturbed because Japanese had to work in unheated factories, he developed electrical pants, with tiny heating wires embedded in the fabric. For how heated pants may make Matsushita, already the Japanese with the highest taxable income, even richer—see BUSINESS, Amps in the Pants.