To get a TIME story to bed accurately often requires the help of many people unconnected with TIME: professional journalists, specialists in every imaginable field of endeavor, possessors of specific facts, plain citizens. Their contributions, freely asked for, are almost always freely and gladly given--a fact of which TIME is proud and for which it is very grateful. Typical of the kind of help these contributors provide is this incident from the work of getting out the March 24th issue:

On Sunday morning, an edited story about children's radio programs came to Radio Researcher Jean Sulzberger from the copy desk. It had been written from research sent in by our Washington Bureau. Its lead paragraph was three stanzas of a poem (a parody of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Children's Hour) by the late Stoddard King, newspaperman, versifier and songwriter. Permission to reprint King's verse would have to be obtained from the copyright owner, but that is usually routine. This time it wasn't.

Miss Sulzberger checked King's bio folder in the morgue without success. She noted that Doubleday & Co. had published four volumes of King's works and, hoping that the verse might be among them, telephoned a Doubleday editor. Nothing could be done until the Doubleday office opened on Monday.

That was all right except for two things: 1) copyright permission might not rest with Doubleday; 2) TIME'S Radio Department goes to press Sunday night.

It was getting late and Miss Sulzberger took another tack. She called Malcolm Glendinning, managing editor of the Spokane (Wash.) Spokesman-Review, for which King had been a columnist and editorial writer, and told him her problem. That night he called back to say that a search of the paper's files had revealed nothing. "By the way," he added, "are you sure Stoddard King wrote it?"

With that black thought--and the blacker thoughts of the copy desk--Miss Sulzberger gave up for the night. Next morning she asked our Washington office where they had found the verse to include in their research. Washington replied that it had been enclosed in a letter to a Congressman from a constituent in Spokane. His name was Jack Knight, and they gave his telephone number.

Soon Mrs. Knight was on the phone, wanting to know why New York wanted to talk to her husband, who had gone to his job at the Bell Furniture Co. The Bell store manager wanted to know the same thing before summoning Knight. After satisfying Knight's curiosity as to how TIME happened to hear of him, he announced that the Stoddard King verse was in his scrapbook at home. He thought he had clipped it originally from the Spokane Daily Chronicle.

By this time the copy desk was not even speaking to Miss Sulzberger. She got the Chronicle's managing editor Harold Cassill on the phone and he promised to do his best. Early Monday night he called back on a three-way hookup so that Spokesman-Review Editor Glendinning, who was on hand, could talk, too. Yes, they had found the printed verse and it was King's, all right. They had persuaded Jack Knight to get his scrapbook and bring it to the Chronicle office. The clipping was carefully removed and the reverse side showed that it was from the Spokesman-Review on a March 6th. It turned out to be March 6, 1933, three months before Stoddard King died.

Miss Sulzberger put a firm red dot over the words Spokane Spokesman-Review in the copyright permission footnote, handed the story in to the copy desk 24 hours late and fled. Several days later an office boy brought to her desk a prime example of the perils of inaccuracy. It was a clipping from Manhattan's Communist Daily Worker, which had picked up TIME'S Radio story, complete with King's verse. There was no acknowledgement of copyright permission. Further, the Worker had made one of journalism's most painful errors : it had disinterred Stoddard King -- identifying him as the "daily bard of the Spokane (Wash.) Spokesman-Review," Miss Sulzberger has felt fine ever since.

Cordially,

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