"His message struck a special chord in me," said Los Angeles Correspondent William Marmon, whose long interview with Alex Haley, the author of Roots, accompanies our cover story. Marmon, whose own roots were in the South, finds that he too has "rattling around in my head some near-biblical family stories told and retold by my grandmother." Like many white Southerners, Marmon chafed against the "distorting experience" of segregation and, to help counteract it, wrote his senior thesis at Princeton on the Harlem renaissance of the 1920s. Correspondent Edward Boyer, who sat in on the interview with Haley, felt a shock of recognition when he saw Roots on TV. Boyer's maternal grandparents were born slaves, and his grandfather had watched General Sherman's troops march through Georgia --marveling, as any nine-year-old boy would, at "all the shiny buttons" on the blue Union uniforms.

The bad weather continued to be major news this week, and in some parts of the country it required extraordinary efforts on the part of our staff. When New York Correspondent Marion Knox was assigned to cover the chilly plight of snowbound Buffalo (see THE NATION), she found that trains had stopped running, all highways were shut down, and no flights were landing at the Buffalo airport. Bundled up in her heaviest ski parka, Knox caught a flight to Rochester, the nearest functioning airfield. From there she hopped a truck carrying 35,000 lbs. of frozen veal, part of a two-mile-long caravan taking emergency rations to the stricken city. "Buffalo was a mess," she reports--streets unplowed, cars buried in snow, people carting groceries home on sleds. "The very fact of being there made you part of the people. 'You stuck here too?' someone would ask, and he'd start right out telling you his story."

We heard an interesting story from Iowa, a follow-up to our Jan. 31 cover on the Big Freeze. The Saturday night after that issue came out, Gordon Neal, at home on his Mount Vernon farm, got an unexpected phone call. The caller: President Jimmy Carter, who had been reading TIME and had seen our reference to the Neals' frozen water pipe. The two chatted about the fuel crisis, Neal's 160-acre farm and the weather. It turned out that Neal's pipe had burst and been repaired. He had, in fact, been in the bathtub when his wife called him to the phone. Said Neal last week: "I told Emma that if that ever happened again, she had better tell me who was on the line."

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