Dear Time-Reader

Every Tuesday afternoon at 4, the hum and clatter stop in TIME'S Letters department and the 15 girls there hold their weekly tea, usually with one self-conscious male guest. Recently I was the guest, having invited myself to announce that Marylois Purdy, acting head of the department for six months and the head researcher for TIME'S National Affairs department for six years before that, is the new permanent department head.

This is a department which once consisted of a single secretary, who took over the job TIME'S editors had done themselves from the start. Except for anonymous letters, our policy of answering every letter is still followed today, even as it was then, although the job has increased tremendously.

For many of the thousands of you who have written to TIME, your most personal contacts with us have been in the answers written by one of the eight girls pictured here. Their task consists of far more than just taking pen in hand. Within reasonable limits, they try to answer any question you have. When you write for an amplification of a story which has appeared in TIME, for instance, we feel our contract with you is to provide further background if we can. In turn, your watchfulness for even our smallest errors helps to keep us from being lulled into any feeling of indifference to facts.

The bulk of your letters are serious and thoughtprovoking, if often partisan. Frequent questions on TIME'S policies mean that the girls must confer often with the editors. Explaining the "why" and "how" of TIME'S reporting is the job these young women are trained to do. Said one reader recently: "My complaint is that TIME does not want to be impartial." To answer such objections, our letter-writers can draw on statements of policy like that carried in our 25th-anniversary issue, which said, in part: "Over its 25 years, TIME acquired in some quarters a reputation for 'impartiality' which it did not seek and does not want. Fairness is TIME'S goal . . . The responsible journalist is 'partial' to that interpretation of the facts which seems to him to fit things as they are. He is fair in not twisting the facts to support his view, in not suppressing the facts that support a different view."

To answer a single letter can often mean hours of careful research. One reader recently wanted us to explain how we concluded that "personal income was the highest ever," was given a fistful of statistics. Another asked when Cardinal Mindszenty had made a certain statement, which, from what we could determine, he had never made. Others wanted to know which astrologer makes the most money (we didn't find out), whether the reader's cousin Alice was one of the world's "best dressed women" in 1949 or any other year (she wasn't), and whether the George Kennan who wrote articles for The Outlook 40 or more years ago was related to the George Kennan whose name had appeared in the Times (a great-uncle).

A few letter-writers get more than they ask for, others less. A German clergyman in the Soviet zone, forced to burn his back copies of TIME, got a year's back issues to rebuild his library. A man planning to open a food shop in Barbados asked for a couple of recipes, got The TIME Reader's Book of Recipes.

Among unfulfilled requests are those from girls overseas who want American husbands, and those asking for medical cures, contest answers and complete data for students' term papers. One unabashed lad even asked us to send him all our envelopes so that he could sell the stamps.

Cordially yours,

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