When the American Newspaper Publishers Association held its annual convention in New York City recently, one of the busiest publishers I know stopped in to chat with several members of TIME's staff. He is Robert Atwood, who is not only editor and publisher of the Anchorage, Alaska Daily Times and chairman of the Alaska Statehood Committee, but also TIME's correspondent in Anchorage.

Atwood isn't quite sure how he got to be a TIME correspondent. It began, he remembers, when he started getting wires from TIME about 15 or 16 years ago, asking for information about Alaska. Busy as he was, he obligingly went to work digging up the facts and answered the wires. Said he: "Sometimes the stuff appeared in the magazine; sometimes it didn't. Then I came to New York on business and dropped in on TIME. I was surprised to learn I was listed as a part-time correspondent."

A major problem at first was that TIME would ask for information from all over Alaska, and "it's a big place." Bob Atwood solved that by relaying the queries to various friends he had made in his travels around the country--other editors, postmasters, schoolteachers.

Atwood is a native of Chicago, but his family roots go back to frontier days in Alaska. One of his uncles had made geological surveys for the Government all over Alaska, and another uncle had founded the Bank of Alaska.

When Atwood attended Clark University in Worcester, Mass., his father wanted him to become a lawyer, and the geologist uncle, then president of the university, urged him to be a geographer. But Atwood decided on a newspaper career, went to work first for the Worcester Telegram and Evening Gazette and later for the Illinois State Journal in Springfield.

While he was in Springfield, his mother wrote to suggest that he look up a young lady who was doing social work there. She was the daughter of the man who had succeeded Atwood's uncle as president of the Bank of Alaska. Atwood decided he had better things to do with his time. Later his mother moved to Springfield, saw to it that her son met the young lady by inviting her to dinner. Atwood decided that he hadn't had better things to do after all, married her a few months later.

When he heard that an Anchorage newspaper was for sale, he bought it. That was in 1935 and the beginning of a blizzard of work for Atwood. The paper's circulation was then 650, and it was printed on an old hand-fed press. Says he: "I never worked so hard in my life before. But the town was growing and healthy, and the paper grew with it. We have two new presses now, built a new plant double the size of the old one, added two more wings since 1946. The Daily Times circulation is now 16,000, and it has a staff of 60 full-time people."

On his recent visit to New York, Atwood told about the most troublesome story he had ever worked on for TIME. It happened near Cordova, Alaska, and involved two boys in a rowboat, who had taken a potshot at an "empty" shed on shore. The shed turned out to be packed with dynamite and was blown skyhigh. Atwood received a long list of questions about the incident. But Cordova was 250 miles and a three-day boat trip away. So he relayed the wire to a friend there, sent the answers back to New York. Discrepancies in the story turned up, and Atwood kept relaying the checking questions to Cordova and the answers to New York, until all the points in dispute had been cleared up. When the story appeared in TIME, it was a four-line item in Miscellany (Dec. 22, 1947).

On still another occasion, when TIME was preparing a story on Alaskan defenses (Nov. 6, 1950), says Atwood: "I got a wire almost a yard long. Some of the information was common knowledge up there, but the answers had to come from the commanding general at headquarters of the Alaskan Command before they could be printed. I knew he wouldn't want to answer them, so I just handed him the wire. When he started to read it, he blew his top. 'They want to know everything,' he roared. But I just kept asking him how to answer it, and he finally gave me a little dope. When the story came out, it had practically all the information he wouldn't give me. TIME sent me a wire explaining that the Pentagon had released it, so I showed it to the general to assure him I hadn't double-crossed him."

Last week, after six weeks of business travel from Washington to San Diego (including conferences on Alaskan statehood, oil development, air transport) and meetings with the Pacific Northwest Trade Association in Tacoma, Atwood was homeward bound. Among his immediate projects: a $50,000 second floor for his newspaper plant.

Cordially yours,

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