For this week's cover story on the California tax revolt and its national repercussions, TIME'S correspondents and editors had to deal with a maze of figures about property taxes, assessments and the often stunning jump in real estate prices. For some correspondents, the statistics were academic and provoked only a mild incredulity. But for Los Angeles Bureau Chief William Rademaekers and Correspondent Joe Kane, the figures were a grim reality: as recent initiates to the California housing scene, they shared the experience and understood the bristling anger of many of the residents they interviewed.

Rademaekers had a typical Southern California tale of woe. Assigned to TIME'S Los Angeles bureau last year, he immediately started house hunting. The experience, he says, was "much like wading gently into an acid bath--a surprising renewal of shock and agony at every turn." After a six-month search, he settled for a two-bedroom "cottage" in West Hollywood. The price: $120,000. No sooner had he moved in and started feeding the gaping koi in his fish basin than he faced the prospect of having his $3,700 property tax raised to well over $5,000.

For Kane, finding a place near Los Angeles last autumn was also traumatic. His choice: a four-bedroom ranch in the west San Fernando Valley, an hour's drive from the bureau. His house, for which he paid $89,000, stands beside an identical one for which his neighbor paid $29,950 in 1964. Without Proposition 13, Kane's taxes, now $1,441, would probably have gone to $3,565 after next year's assessments. Said Kane: "Even out here in the magic kingdom of Disneyland, a man's home is his castle. But that is no reason to tax it that way, especially when you have to gift wrap the trash to get it picked up."

All of this seemed a mite histrionic to TIME'S Senior Writer Ed Magnuson, who wrote the story in New York. Magnuson has bought half a dozen houses in eight years, all of them among the granite and evergreen hills of New Hampshire. Each time, his wife Mae and a skilled craftsman have fixed up the homestead, to see it sold at a profit. Currently, the Magnusons reside in the town of New London, N.H., in a four-bedroom house for which they paid $59,000 last autumn. The taxes are under $800. Muses Magnuson: "Considering that New Hampshire has no sales tax or state income tax, I guess that's not too bad."

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