Dear TIME-Reader:

RELATIVES and old friends of Charles Van Doren who have been cheering the new television sensation as he won $122,000 in ten appearances on NBC's quiz show, Twenty One, were suddenly submitted to some intensive quizzing themselves last week. When TIME'S Television & Radio section scheduled a fast cover story on Van Doren, queries went out to reporters all over the U.S., in England and France. Almost overnight back came a flood of reminiscences about Van Doren from poets and philosophers, from former teachers and old classmates, even from his landlady while he was a student at Cambridge University and a poker-playing Army buddy, now an advertising man in Huntington, W. Va. While Contributing Editor James Atwater tracked down other sources in suburban Connecticut, on the Columbia campus and in Greenwich Village, Researcher Audrey Blodgett and Associate Editor Lester Bernstein, who wrote the cover story, quizzed Van Doren himself. During the interview, Bernstein and Van Doren quickly discovered that they had one thing in common: both are former TIME correspondents in England, the former as a staffer in the London bureau and the latter a stringer at Cambridge.

MUCH of the Roman Catholic world has wondered: When will the Pope call another consistory? To get the answer (see "Red Hats" in RELIGION), our Correspondent William Rospigliosi drove from the Rome bureau across town to the Vatican, where he can find his way through the maze of corridors and rumors as well as most cardinals. At the Vatican, Correspondent Rospigliosi is Prince Rospigliosi, a title that dates back to the Holy Roman Empire. One of his ancestors was Pope Clement IX (1667-69). His grandfather, Camillo Rospigliosi. was a captain of the Pope's personal bodyguard from 1878 till 1915. Title and ancestry are useful in covering the Vatican, but Correspondent Rospigliosi can also count on his vast knowledge of Vatican lore and the confidences of well-placed sources acquired over the years since he first started covering the Holy See in 1938.

TRANSFERRED from Washington to our Boston bureau, Correspondent Kenneth Froslid was compiling a list of addresses of potential news sources when he came upon the name of Boston's private Speech School for Crippled Children in the phone book. He wondered whether it would make an education story for TIME. It did. Froslid reported about the school's 38-year history. its 78-year-old founder-director, Emma Tunnicliff, and its volunteer instructors who tried to help make ends meet by collecting old license plates to sell as scrap metal (TIME, Jan. 28). Since the story appeared, Boston newsmen have found their way to the school, donations by the hundreds have poured in from all over the U.S., and volunteer facultymen are winnowing the more remunerative offers for TV appearances. Last week Emma Tunnicliff said happily: "Thanks to TIME'S story, we're not only thinking of maintenance--we're even going to do some brightening up!"

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