Dear Mr. Linen:

We have enjoyed your stories on the editors, writers and researchers. It is a general feeling that it might be a good idea to do another interesting story on a group of employes that play an important role in getting out TIME: the copy girls & boys.

We are sure that you will find interesting material among us, many of whom have college backgrounds and even a few degrees. . . .

Sincerely yours,

The Distributing Editors

Although TIME'S crowded masthead doesn't list the "Distributing Editors," their colleagues wouldn't know what to do without them. There are 100 of them altogether, deployed from the Mail Room to the Morgue, performing the time-honored function of office boys & girls everywhere. For us, they carry countless "takes" of editorial copy, distribute some 1,500 newspapers, hundreds of telegrams and messages every day; lug advertising plates to the printer, contracts to the lawyer, pick up photographs at the Customs House, turn on the air conditioning, sharpen pencils, turn off the air conditioning, ad infinitum. One office boy does nothing but track down lost people (somebody's office in TIME gets moved every day).

When our OBs went to war we began recruiting OGs. In that interval our office girls established themselves and their own traditions. Like U.S. military school plebes sent to fetch "the cannon reports" or "a yard of skirmish line," new OGs now have to find out the hard way that there is no such thing as "striped ink," a "paper stretcher," or the 13th floor.

Those OBs who returned from the war, where they served in all theaters and earned their share of awards and rank (plenty of brass, including one lieutenant colonel), have gone on to jobs in TIME more suitable to their maturity and experience. Their postwar replacements have been largely veterans, too: combat infantrymen, Navy fighter pilots, an Army Air Forces Captain who had his own squadron in the Pacific, and a sprinkling of durable Marines.

Like any lively, ambitious cross-section of young Americans, TIME'S office boys & girls (average age: 20 years) burn plenty of extracurricular midnight oil. Some go to night school and college; a few work for their M.A. or Ph.D. degrees; office girls take our courses in typing, shorthand, etc. The results are varied and interesting. Not long ago one of our OBs left to become an instructor at Amherst College, another went to South America to be a professional wrestler, an OG blossomed into a Conover model, and an OB who had departed to become a monk returned because he found that life too quiet after the corridors of the TIME & LIFE building.

A recent study of 28 of our former office boys showed that after a decent interval seven had become writers, nine were executives in various business departments, and five were salesmen or junior salesmen in the advertising department. One of the few tapped by Managing Editor T. S. Matthews for his staff was so taken with the thought of becoming a TIME writer that before his new assignment began he had worried himself into the hospital with the familiar occupational ailment of journalists everywhere: duodenal ulcers. He has since calmed down and is doing well.

Cordially,

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