Dear Time-Reader

Many news stories, like good detective work, are the result of considerable pavement pounding. When the editors decided to do this week's National Affairs story about New York City's large and growing colony of Puerto Ricans, they were confronted with a mass of published material that was thoroughly contradictory. James Bell, our New York City reporter, was assigned to find out what the score really was. Says Bell:

"If you believed all that has been written about these people, you would have thought they were monsters. They turned out to be more or less like any other group: some good, some bad, but basically nice people. The only way to do the story was on foot. One day I walked from 96th Street to 155th, zigzagging all the way. I found that you just can't walk up to a Puerto Rican's door and ask questions. So I got one family to give me a note of introduction to another family, etc. It worked fine. And although these Puerto Ricans are about as poor as you can get, they were unfailingly hospitable, usually insisting that I drink a steaming cup of coffee (75-c- a pound in Spanish Harlem) before I left. It was a weary, rewarding job."

Bell's expense account carried one item that called for an explanation: $1.40 for incense. He bought some professed "love-bringing, money-bringing, power-bringing charms" to help set the atmosphere of Spanish Harlem for A. T. Baker, who wrote the story.

No group of TIME readers is more militantly American than our 2,100 subscribers scattered through Alaska's 586,400 square miles. They get the U.S. edition of TIME by air express, so that most of them are reading their weekly copies at the same time as U.S. readers. In this week's mail one of them wrote as follows:

"We live here in lonely and baronial fashion, tolerated by the Thlingets, excoriated by the tourists, and between teaching, instructing, exhorting and advising the village people, we read TIME from cover to cover, to our own amazement. If we should tell you that we are educating ourselves politically, that we sit down in earnest and quiet with atlas and history and follow your correspondents around the world; that our young son reads TIME as religiously as he does his Calvert lessons; that we feel we have a private periscope to search the wide horizons which stretch from this minuscule point of vantage, it makes dull reading but true.

"Various people in public affairs have told us that TIME is biased and that we are too inexperienced to see it, but they have been unable to point out from what bias you operate, and we are still curiously and avidly searching each issue to discover it. Alaska is a good place to come to, to find out what you think."

Another, Ernest Krinby, of Aniak, an old sourdough, admits that times have changed. He recalls that 20 years ago there were two mail deliveries a year by dog team, and that on those occasions you would "lock the door and read for a week." Now the mail plane arrives every day, weather permitting. Says he: "Civilization is creeping up on us. And," he adds, contrary to all literary expectations, "we are glad of it."

In Chicago last week a professional magician named Milbourne Christopher demonstrated a new trick which won him the award of magician's magician of the year. Before 1,000 of his colleagues assembled for their yearly convention, he held up two issues of TIME, one with Actress Carol Channing on the cover, the other with President Truman. He asked a young lady from the audience to choose one of the magazines. She chose the Truman issue, and he folded it with the cover portrait inside and told her to hold it. Holding up the Channing issue for all to see, he folded it, slapped it against his side, opened it up again, and there was Harry Truman. The young lady thereupon found out that she was holding the Channing issue.

This sleight-of-hand performance moved the magicians to award Christopher a gold-plated statuette for "professional originality." He told them: "You have witnessed something no man has ever been able to do before: change TIME.

Cordially yours,

James A. Linen

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