MUCH is said and read these days about the young and the old, but the long, productive middle years draw little attention. High time then, the editors decided, to take a look at the middle-aged as a group.

The very phrase used to have a pejorative connotation, a suggestion of decline. But a surprising number of people were willing to admit that they belong in the category, and to talk frankly about their lives and those of their friends. We defined middle age as ranging from 40 to 60. Although she barely qualifies, Actress Lauren Bacall, 41, struck the editors as a fitting (and certainly comely) personification of the Command Generation. Widowed, remarried, mother of three, heroine of several comebacks, she has a tested quality of spirit; she is game.

Concerned as we are with age in this week's cover, it may be in order to say a word about our own years. TIME itself was 43 last March. The three top editors (managing editor and the two assistant managing editors) average out on the brink of 50, which also happens to be the age of the publisher. The associate and contributing editors, who constitute TIME's writing force, are an average 40, but 26 of them are 35 or under. A few other averages: senior editors, 43; researchers, 33, although ten are 25 or under; the Washington bureau, 38; the Boston bureau, 34; and the London bureau, 40. The average of these averages is just a greying hair over 40--when, one is pleasantly reminded, it has been said that life begins.

Of the people who worked on the cover story, Researcher Mary Vanaman, who undertook an impressive survey of the facts, figures and philosophies of middle age, and Boston Bureau Chief Ruth Mehrtens, who interviewed Miss Bacall, are both above the average for their categories. So are Editor Cranston Jones, 48, and Writer Ted Kalem, 46.

Kalem is TIME's theater critic, but since Broadway is currently in its summer doldrums, he is lending his talent to other sections (he was responsible for the recent Essay on the state of the modern theater). His career has been varied and productive. He was born in Maiden, Mass., of Greek parents from Asia Minor, and his first language was Greek. He majored in sociology at Harvard ('42, cum laude) and planned to go to Harvard Law School, but World War II interfered. After 3 1/2 years as an infantryman, mostly in the Pacific (five campaigns, Bronze Star), Kalem turned to another of his many interests--finance. For the next two years, he wrote a weekly stock-market letter, later did book reviews for the Christian Science Monitor, which caught TIME's eye.

After he came to TIME in 1950, he wrote book reviews and some memorable cover stories--among them Shakespeare, Boris Pasternak, Tennessee Williams. Always aisle-struck, Kalem first dreamed of being a drama critic when he was 16, was delighted when he finally fulfilled that ambition at TIME in 1961. Equally pleased, apparently, were his fellow first-nighters ("an unruly band of middle-agers"), who have twice elected him president of the New York Drama Critics' Circle.

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