When Dick Serafin left his TIME office in Chicago, the weather reports were forecasting only a light snowfall.

That prospect did not faze him at all. As TIME'S Chicago production and distribution manager, he is used to coping with the challenges of his city's winters. But Serafin awoke the next morning to find nearly a foot of snow on the ground, with more coming. "It was snowing so heavily," he recalls, "that I couldn't see the end of my block. I was completely surprised--and very worried."

Understandably so. Every weekend the pages of TIME are composed on film at Chicago's R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co. printing plant, and a set of negatives is flown to each of our other seven printing plants throughout the U.S. and seven more scattered around the world. If the film packets leave Chicago late, special efforts must be made to overcome the delay. What's more, some four-color ad pages are printed in Chicago and then sent by truck to U.S. plants for binding in the final copies.

As the storm worsened, Serafin ordered five trailer trucks to leave for their destinations ahead of schedule. Then he and his staff chartered three Learjets for Sunday in case the blizzard knocked out the regular commercial airlines that normally carry the films of the editorial pages. It did. When the blizzard finally blew itself out, there were 30 in. of snow on the ground and O'Hare International Airport was closed.

But Pal-Waukee Airport, 30 miles away, began operating Sunday afternoon, and so did Meigs Field, a small facility on Chicago's lakefront. Serafin had a helicopter leased at Meigs and flew the film to Pal-Waukee, where the waiting Learjets immediately departed. Serafin was also finally able to get the ads through by truck, and the Jan. 22 issues, bearing the cover picture of Soviet Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev, rolled off the presses on schedule nearly everywhere.

It had been a close call, the closest that Serafin, a 13-year veteran of TIME, or his fellow workers in Chicago can remember. "I never doubted that the magazine would come out," he says. "We were just too determined to succeed."

Such feats of improvisation, however, will soon be the stuff of nostalgia, tales to be recounted around a warm computer on a snowy weekend. Later this year TIME will start transmitting text and pictures electronically to its printing plants, a technological advance that will help our readers get the latest fast-breaking news, no matter how much it may storm in Chicago or anywhere around the world.

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