In these days, it is a backroads traveler indeed who is not able to buy a copy of TIME any place from the Rio Grande to the Arctic Circle. The job of getting the right number of magazines to the right place at the right time rests in the hands of a 73-man task force of newsstand representatives in the U.S. and five in Canada. They are headed by Circulation Newsstand Director J. Paul Young and his sales manager, Tony Jackson, who direct the operations from New York. For the newsstand reps, storms, wrecks, scrambled schedules and great distances are all part of the week's work. Take Canada, for example. The five newsstand reps in the Dominion of Canada are Michael Callahan, responsible for all of Canada; Larry Goulet and his assistant Dick Genin, who work from Ontario east through Newfoundland; and Bill Pearson, with his assistant Dick Schouten, responsible for Manitoba west through British Columbia.

Their job of seeing that copies are delivered on schedule in the right quantity sometimes requires emergency action. For example, last month a plane carrying the newsstand copies of TIME for British Columbia and Alberta crashed and burned. The American News Co. in Winnipeg called TIME'S production office in Chicago to rush all available extra copies west. Callahan phoned his distributors in Toronto and Montreal to strip their newsstands to the bare minimum and air-express the copies to Vancouver, where Pearson was busy making special arrangements with his distributors to meet the off-schedule shipments as they arrived.

One of the toughest three-week distribution scrambles that Pearson has had was during the Fraser Valley flood of 1948. All eastern rail and road connections to Vancouver were cut off. Pearson was on the phone almost constantly, directing shipments of TIME off planes to trains, and off stranded trains back to planes as bridges went out, flights were canceled. Says he: "It was an hour-to-hour guessing game of where to shuffle the load next."

TIME'S representatives work closely with the 54 American News Co. and independent wholesale distributors across Canada who deliver the magazine. They also keep close contact with the newsdealers themselves, supplying display racks, seeing that each dealer gets the proper supply of magazines, watching for special stories. Some stories may have a particular local interest. In such cases, a larger number of copies of that issue, along with newsstand posters, can be moved into the area.

All of this, of course, means a great deal of travel. Callahan and Goulet have home bases in Toronto, while Pearson makes his headquarters in Vancouver. Callahan takes at least two trans-Canada trips annually, tallies some 10,000 automobile miles a year, figures his year-long flight log at about 20,000 miles. Larry Goulet's eastern territory requires some 20,000 miles of driving every year, 10,000 miles of flying.

Covering his western territory, Bill Pearson travels some 60,000 miles a year by air, plus more mileage by car, train and boat. Pearson decided long before the war that he wanted to work for TIME. He got his wish in 1945. Part of his magazine sales background included a Depression-time job organizing door-to-door selling of a weekly magazine. At first, he found recruiting a junior sales staff difficult. Then one day he put a card table in his car, bought a 60-c- watermelon and parked near a school. As the youngsters came out, they swarmed around the table for a piece of the melon. Within two years he had some 300 boys selling magazines for him and collecting commissions for themselves. According to Pearson's accounting, each 60-c- watermelon produced 40 salesmen.

Cordially yours,

James A. Linen

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