The reporting for this week's cover story on the aged in the U.S.

began with the widely publicized revelations about scandalous condi tions in nursing homes across the country. But Senior Editor Martin Goldman, who directed the project, felt that TIME'S story should "go beyond exposes of death camps for the elderly" and explore more broadly how older citizens are-- and should be-- helped in mid-1970s America. To that end, TIME correspondents not only visited nursing homes, good and bad, but toured other enclaves for the aged, from elegant "retirement villages" in Florida to the peeling stoops of Boston's South End. Public health officials and gerontologists were tapped for their views, but the most poignant interviews were with old people -- and their often guilt-anguished children. Goldman, Associate Editor Peter Stoler, who wrote the story, and Reporter Gail Eisen, who researched it, were moved by the agony that millions of older Americans endure, but are hopeful that U.S. society is finding ways to pro vide what Stoler calls "the concerned, humane care to which the elderly are entitled."

It was early April when San Francisco Correspondent John Austin, swaddled in lay ers of arctic gear, stepped warily out of a warm airplane at Prudhoe Bay on Alaska's oil-rich North Slope to begin reporting the story in the Nation section on the Alyeska pipeline project. Though the temperature was a nippy--50DEG F., old North Slope hands assured Austin he was enjoying unusually balmy spring weather. "Maybe so," he recalls, "but I didn't see any of them getting out the volleyball net."

Austin interviewed oilmen, contractors and job-hunting boomers from the Lower 48 for the story which was written by Associate Editor James Atwater, with the help of Reporter-Researcher Marta Dorion. Correspondent Christopher Ogden and Photographer Steve Northup toured the state to measure the impact of petroleum-based prosperity on Alaska's life-style and pristine environment. Both of those, they found, were not what they had been in gold-rush days. In Point Barrow, for instance, some of the Eskimos whom Ogden had come to interview turned up with Texas oil lawyers and New York accountants in respectful attendance. "I rode the only dog sled in Barrow," Ogden reports. "It belongs to a white high school teacher. The natives have turned in their dogs for snow mobiles."

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