I have just returned from two very exciting weeks on the Pacific Coast. I had been unable to get to the Coast since before the war; so when TIME'S Editor, Harry Luce, asked if I would like to go along with him, I jumped at the chance. We flew out to Portland and traveled south from there.

First stop was a testimonial banquet to another publisher: "Ep" Hoyt, of the Portland Oregonian, with whom I worked in OWI. He was leaving to take over the Denver Post (TIME, Feb. 18), and some 500 of Portland's leading citizens got up the banquet to show that they were sorry to see him go. West Coast citizens certainly have a tremendous personal interest in their communities and a deep sense of civic responsibility for them.

Twenty miles from Portland, at the little old town of West Linn on the Willamette River, we stopped off at the Crown Zellerbach paper mill. There Crown Zellerbach is converting a newsprint machine to make the kind of book paper we need to print TIME on. They are also installing a new-type coating machine to coat the paper, using a method which Time Inc. pioneered. As you probably know, paper is scarce, but when these machines start producing we expect the quality of paper in the copies we print on the Pacific Coast to be considerably improved.

You can not travel far on the Coast without becoming indoctrinated with the prevalent vigorous business optimism. Not even the difficulties of reconversion or the current labor-management disputes seem to dent it. In San Francisco, as elsewhere along the Coast, we talked to as many people as possible to try to hear all sides of the West Coast viewpoint. In the process we also had a chance to talk with Time Inc.'s newsmen who, as I told you sometime ago, have been multiplying out there since we established our first Pacific Coast bureau in San Francisco 11 years ago. There are more of them there today than ever before because the Coast is making more national news than ever before.

It is not easy to visit Los Angeles without taking a look at its airplane industry. The day I visited one plant they were finishing the biggest passenger plane I ever saw. The top of the tail section was five and a half stories above my head Later, I was discussing this new plane with an airline's president who listened to my enthusiastic account and said: "It's a great ship, but it's already obsolete." Airmen are hard to understand.

As you may recall, we have been printing copies of TIME in Los Angeles for the last two years. Our printer, Pacific Press Inc., is now turning out about 250,000 copies a week for West Coast readers. When our new high-speed presses, now being designed and built on the West Coast, and other new machinery go into operation, we expect to speed up our delivery of TIME to Pacific Coast subscribers and newsstand buyers.

On the way, owing to a faulty oil gauge on the plane, we put down unexpectedly at the Prescott, Ariz, airport and unexpectedly found 1) a restaurant serving my kind of ham & eggs, and 2) a subscriber with a new angle on TIME. He maintains that it is a very tough magazine.

His reason was interesting. A veteran of the Pacific war, now recuperating at Prescott's big Army hospital, he said that when six copies of TIME'S domestic edition turned up in his division during the Buna campaign, the boys took infinite pains to preserve them so they could pass them along, page by page. For some reason, the slick paper they were printed on survived the New Guinea jungle rot better than any other reading matter.

Nevertheless, he said, it was a "great day" when word came announcing TIME'S Pony edition for the troops. Understandably enough, the thing he liked best about it was Miscellany. More than anything else in the magazine, it spelled "home" to him.

Cordially,

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