Whenever we feel that all is serene here at TIME, our (and your) most unpredictable opponent invariably rares back and lets us have it. It's the weather.

In spring the aurora borealis interrupts the direct wires to our printing plants in Chicago and Philadelphia, jumbling the transmission, mixing words and phrases, so that we have to send the copy over until it is intelligible. If that isn't irritating enough, nature sometimes steps in with a sterner warning--like the lightning bolt that struck the Philadelphia plant one Monday (deadline) night, knocking out the power supply. Type had to be reset in another plant, and teletypesetters worked round the clock. Chances are that your copy of TIME was late that week.

In all kinds of weather changing temperatures can cause static electricity in the rolls of paper we print oh. This slows down the presses, each of which can turn out 15,000 copies an hour. Paper, which is very sensitive, expands, contracts, absorbs moisture, and, when its temperature is not carefully controlled, wraps itself around the cylinders and jams the press. Pressmen then have to pick it off the cylinders--an hours-long job.

July and August, especially, are months when ink gets more fluid and it is necessary to cut down on the thinner; when high humidity makes the absorbent paper stick to the rolls and break; when artists have trouble with their art, photostats get off the beam (expansion--contraction again), and what the sweating printer (working in temperatures up to 100 degrees) has to say about it all is unprintable.

Winter is no bargain, either. Its snowstorms, which the dauntless U.S. postal service defies, stall the trains TIME depends on for prompt U.S. delivery; its uncertain weather and icing conditions ground the planes delivering TIME'S pictures to the printer and the film we use for printing our International editions abroad. Once it trapped a correspondent we desperately wanted to get in touch with for a solid month on a tiny Atlantic island.

Sun spots bother us, too, of course, just as they bother all overseas transmission. Once, inadvertently, they helped us. The head of one of our overseas bureaus had sent in the qualifications of a correspondent he wanted to hire. He asked for an immediate reply. Our answer was negative, but by the time the wires were unspotted our bureau head had hired the man. He turned out to be a very good correspondent.

But weather that is bad enough to strand suburbanites here in the New York City area no longer concerns us as much as it did when TIME was very young and its editorial staff was small. Then, a major crisis in transportation could disrupt the copy for an entire issue. OldTIMErs also like to recall the days when they worked in an old office building on East 40th Street. No other tenant worked there over the weekend, so in winter there was no heat. They made out, somehow, despite the fact that it was impossible to run a typewriter with mittens on.

Now, although the editors still shudder at the quality of the first-draft copy that arrives at their desks during a four-day heat wave, TIME is organized to achieve at least a stand-off against the weather. Being city dwellers, our harbinger of the seasons is not the robin nor any of the age-old signs; it is the medical department. When one of our researchers turned up there early last month, sunburned, peppered with mosquito bites, black & blue from having fallen into a brook, nursing a finger blistered from picking daisies, we could be sure that summer was at hand.

Cordially,

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