COVERING the news in Little Rock last week was an experience that TIME'S correspondents will not soon forget. Three TIME reporters--Dallas Bureau Chief Bill Rappeleye, Chicago Correspondents Burt Meyers and Jack Olsen--were marked men, thanks to Governor Orval Faubus, who blamed TIME for many of his self-made troubles in a radio-TV broadcast the week before. Reported Burt Meyers: "We found frequent references being made to TIME, few, if any, complimentary --and some were downright bloodthirsty. But we kept our mouths shut, dodged any questions about our connections and kept out of trouble." Even so, Meyers, for example, found himself swept into mob action directed straight at himself. Says he: "I was in part of the crowd that was looking around for a 'nigger-lovin' TIME reporter.' I was told, 'We've got a knife for him.' I looked around with them, eased quickly away into a less aggressive part of the crowd. I also had the ignominious experience of being part of the mob chasing Chicago LIFE Correspondent Paul Welch and his photographer partner Grey Villet. I saw Grey holding his long lens out of the crowd's reach. I started over in that direction, along with the mob. A fellow asked me, 'What's goin' on?' His answer came from a stocky butcher-boy type who yelled, 'It's one of them nigger-lovin' LIFE photographers. Let's get him!' Butcher-boy seized my arm, pulled me along with him. So while Paul and Grey were trying to escape the crowd, I was in hot pursuit. I got out of the crowd beside the green police car into which Paul and Grey were finally pushed. As the police brought them past, with the mob--including neatly dressed high school girls--howling and spitting obscenities around us, I looked Paul straight in the eye and pretended that I'd never seen him before. He stared right back with equally cold non-recognition." For the results of TIME'S coverage this week, see the cover story in NATIONAL AFFAIRS, Quick, Hard & Decisive.

THERE was a new stir around Florida's Cape Canaveral, in U.S. missileland. On the hot, palmetto-studded beach, Photographer Stan Wayman, on assignment for TIME, set up his camera, trained its long telescopic lens in the direction of four gantry towers two miles away, and waited. The wait turned into a monotonous, week-long vigil. The monotony was relieved by the arrival of his wife with an ice chest and a bottle of champagne. It was the Waymans' seventh anniversary; they celebrated it on the beach.

At the end of six days, after enduring near-100DEG temperatures and a rainstorm that drenched him to the skin, Photographer Wayman's patience was rewarded, and his color film caught the full flight, from start to finish, of the second test flight of the U.S.'s intercontinental ballistics missile, the Atlas. Hours later, the film was on its way to New York for processing, and the following day the pictures were in Chicago being engraved and printed. This week, less than seven days after the event, they appear in TIME, the first color photographs of the Atlas in flight. See NATIONAL AFFAIRS, Death of the Big Bird.

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