How many of the people you know personally have been mentioned in the columns of TIME'S Milestones, Miscellany, or People sections?

Of all TIME'S departments, these three have changed the least--perhaps because they exemplify best one of our basic beliefs: that the way to tell the story of the news is in terms of the people who make the news.

Every week about 35 news items end up in MMP. They are the newsworthy survivors of a long list of births, deaths, marriages, divorces, utterances, and doings of known people, and, so far as Miscellany is concerned, the whimsicalities and outrages of the unknown. (Our Miscellany Editor, in his annual selection of the year's best items from his section, calls them "a calendar of triumphs, defeats and contortions of the human spirit.")

Many of these 35-odd items could be blown up into full-size news stories, but our editors feel that when a man everybody knows gets married, or a woman whose name isa household term has a baby, etc., a brief recording of these events is all you want to know. They are a part of the condensation which permits TIME to tell as much of the week's news as it is possible to tell.

It takes three men and a researcher to do MMP every week. They turn out two or three times the number of items that eventually get printed. But not so very long ago Ted Robinson, our People Editor, did all of them himself. Times have changed. The war has increased people's appetite for world news, and multiplied the work of TIME'S editors, who sift it for you.

Although most comments on MMP come from you, we also hear occasionally from our subjects. Hollywood's Errol Flynn. who has some kind of affinity for the People section, is forever writing in to "straighten" us out on this or that technicality of his misadventures. Not long ago Clark Gable's first wife, Josephine Dillon, communicated her displeasure at another magazine's description of her as "many years his [Gable's] senior.'' She thought we ought to know that she is only "three'' years older than Gable, who is "swiftly approaching fifty."

Most of MMP's items are a product of the run of the week's news, but we interview a number of subjects ourselves. One of them, flat-bellied (his own term) Author Michael Arlen, whose observations about his life & times subsequently appeared in People (TIME, Feb. 11), was so impressed with the work of the researcher who interviewed him that he applied for a job as People writer. We are also indebted to you for some of the items in MMP. In that category, however, our champion contributor is Capt. Frank Luckel, U.S. Navy (ret.), who has been sending us items--many of which we have printed--consistently for the last 16 years.

Capt. Luckel has a nose for Miscellany. An inveterate collector of the odd in news items, he snips them out of the newspapers, jots them down from the radio. He sent us his first contribution in 1930 because it especially amused him. It was a little item about a Washington, D.C., woman who won a divorce from her husband because of an infidelity he allegedly committed 31 years previously.

Capt. Luckel is also one of our oldest and most traveled subscribers. He began reading TIME shortly after our first issue appeared in 1923. and has kept on reading it throughout his tours of duty all over the world. Now that he has retired from his World War II job as naval censorship administrator for the Northwest Sea Frontier, his contributions have increased and he has decided to run for the California State Assembly. To old-TIMER Luckel, good luck, and thanks for the Miscellany.

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