News reporting is more than writing down what is in front of a reporter's eyes. Many great events (battles, national elections, economic trends) cannot be grasped by a single witness. The record has to be pieced together from scores of individual observations. Usually, TIME'S editors do the work of piecing together; sometimes much of this work is done for them by a reporter in the field, working from the accounts of other men. That is what happened on TIME'S story of the Kansas City flood.

The flood was covered by TIME String (part-time) Correspondent Champ Clark, grandson of Missouri's late Speaker of the House and son of former Senator Bennett Clark, now U.S. Circuit Judge in the District of Columbia. Young (28) Clark's regular work is at the rewrite desk of the Kansas City Star, where he was assigned late in June, wettest month on Kansas weather records, to write the stories on flood conditions throughout the region.

The rains were still coming when he began an at-home vacation on July 8, dampened his "already ghastly" golf game. By Friday the 13th the Kansas River (called "the Kaw" by Clark and other natives) had broken all records, roared over levees into two city districts. Assistant City Editor Paul Miner woke Clark at 6 o'clock that morning, asked him to "get the hell down to the office as fast as possible." An hour later, Clark was back at work on the flood story.

During the next three days Reporter Clark slept only five hours, while he wrote some 14 columns of fast-breaking news for the Star and its sister paper (morning), the Times. At the rewrite desk he took calls from 48 legmen who blanketed the city. When they came slopping into the office, he cornered them for more details of their particular beats. With an eye on the flood query wired to him by TIME, he also kept in touch with city and Army engineers and with Red Cross headquarters, dug up accounts of previous floods from the morgue. By Saturday afternoon, when City Editor Ralph Eades gave him time off to finish the first "takes" of his TIME report, he was a walking, if tired, encyclopedia on his subject, the costliest flood in U.S. history. He had a wealth of detail, and something that one or two reporters splashing around in the rapidly rising water could not have pulled together fast enough--a broad knowledge of the flood from the time it started weeks before in central Kansas until it covered 1,384 blocks of the Kansas Cities. He boiled his TIME report down to 15 concise teletype pages.

Though he had written of little but the flood for three weeks, Clark got his first look at the flood waters Sunday morning, when, after working all night and sleeping at home for an hour, he was awakened by a call from Barron Beshoar, deputy chief of TIME'S U.S. and Canadian news service, in New York. Beshoar wanted to know when Clark could finish one very necessary part of the flood assignment--an account of the disaster as seen by a family caught in it.

Clark drove down to Red Cross headquarters in Kansas City, Mo., for a look at the refugee situation there, then crossed the raging Kaw on the Inter City Viaduct into the melee of flood-fighting Kansas City, Kans. Wrote Clark: "Cars loaded with disaster workers were speeding all over the streets, red lights blinking and sirens shrieking. Dazed evacuees milled around . . . Convoys of ten to twenty trucks would form, load up with sweaty, bare-chested men and, led by sirened cars, rush the new volunteers to the scene of the fight . . ."

He found Mrs. Emile LaBorde and family, who had faced the flood with oldtimers' calm (she baked a berry pie after most of their neighbors had fled), then left everything behind and ridden a rescue boat to a disaster station, where they thought of little but the opportunity to get back to their home.

After a firsthand look at some damage and flood-fighting, Clark went back to file by wire five pages more copy, which he updated on Monday. Clark's report became a 78-line story, about a column and a quarter, in the July 23 issue. The writer in New York, aided by other reports from Washington and Topeka, Kans., worked from a full, clear picture of the flood.

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