Since many of you offered--and gave --help to Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., you will be happy to know that the city's epidemic has been checked. With only 13 new cases reported during the past month, the total number under daily treatment has been reduced to 835.

Two months ago, when we ran our story on the Soo's all-out fight against the worst ringworm epidemic ever recorded in the U.S. or Canada, 1,500 sufferers were taking painful treatments. Hundreds yelled while nurses snatched infected hairs out by the roots. The city was so itchy that teachers led classroom prayers for the plague to be lifted.

Reader response was immediate and varied--and free. An Arkansas lawyer recommended that doctors use the juice of green walnut hulls, which had cured his grandson. A Brooklyn insecticide company asked permission to fog the whole town with a special germicide. One company wanted to send 500 cases of ringworm medicine. Dozens of firms offered cures. Some sent doctors to study the epidemic and supervise treatment.

Because ringworm is caused by various fungi, cures that worked somewhere else had no certainty of curing the Soo. Most effective help came from Hoffmann-La Roche, Inc., of Nutley, N.J., which followed up the TIME story by sending Dr. Ruth Wolfe to hold rallies in which she taught mothers to use an experimental drug called R02-2453. Hoffmann-La Roche flew in 200 cases of this new medicine to help stop the spreading fungus.

Says the city health officer: "We have received over 250 offers of help from all over the U.S. and Canada . . .

Offers are still pouring in. These have meant much to the city. All offered help in the spirit of helping their fellow man in distress . . . We are all deeply grateful to TIME for attracting worldwide attention to our epidemic and getting us aid."

One morning last spring a worried young Broadway producer strode aboard a Los Angeles-New York plane with TIME'S May 1st issue clutched in his hand. For more than a year handsome Ernie Martin had scouted movies, radio, TV and theater, but he could not find the right soprano to play the mission doll in his new musical, Guys &Dolls. The girl had to be able to sing like an old trouper and look like a teen-aged angel.

Ernie brooded about his improbable soprano while he, a front-of-the-book-first reader of this magazine, settled down to NATIONAL AFFAIRS. About Denver, he flipped to the RADIO & TELEVISION section, and did a double take. There, in a story about a British Broadcasting Corp. television show, was a picture of 22-year-old Isabel Bigley. "The story said she was good and the picture looked right," remembers Ernie, "so I asked my partner [Cy Feuer] to look her up in London."

The persistent producers trailed Isabel from London to Hollywood, and at last signed her up a few days before rehearsals began. A former secretary, Isabel had been an unknown chorus girl on Broadway. But Guys & Dolls, now a smash hit, has boosted her fast. "She's a find like Mary Martin," said Ernie Martin, "and it all started because I read TIME on a plane from Los Angeles."

Cordially yours,

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